CLEAN: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity
This book looks at the interrelated histories of grooming, cosmetics, ritual, public health, purification, preventative medicine and cleanliness from pre-historic times to the present. It’s a big topic, so this is a long review, and I’ve split it into two parts.
The book starts with observations of how animals such as apes and monkeys groom each other, and how this behaviour creates social cohesion and reinforces norms as well as having a hygienic function. Virginia Smith shows how grooming behaviour manifests in modern humans, both as individuals and groups, ranging from brushing teeth and trimming nails, to stroking each others hair, picking fluff from others clothes, and submitting to grooming from others, like hairdressers and dentists.
Smith then goes on to a fascinating account of how primitive tribal grooming behaviour evolved along with settled human society in the Fertile Crescent, becoming intimately connected to both spirituality and to economic and material development. “Keeping yourself nice” became synonymous with living a good and moral life; and cosmetics and medicines were major drivers of trade that led to the growth of cities and kingdom around the Mediterranean and across to India and China. Smith also discusses the rise of a bathing culture. the development of medicine and the beginnings of concepts of ritual cleanliness.
With the decline of the Roman empire, action shifts to the Dark Ages and medieval Europe. Smith contends that medieval times may not have been as filthy as we portray them in contemporary culture: she points out that pre-christian, pre-Roman practices such as river bathing and saunas continued for many centuries. The Church was keen to stamp out what they saw as as pagan and immoral practices, such as public baths and cosmetics, but never really succeeded – it would seem that people’s urge to be as physically clean and pretty as they could manage far outweighed their desire for salvation.
In part ii, to be published Thursday: the Black Death, saucy aspects of Quakerism, Rousseau at your mothers’ group, and what I actually thought of the book.
