Pretty dirty things: a survey

KATHERINE ASHENBURG (JENNA MUIRHEAD-WARREN)

Did you know that people rarely used soap to wash their bodies until the late 19th century? Or that you can now buy antimicrobial tape designed to be stuck to the tongue as an "oral-care strip"? Katherine Ashenburg's delightful cultural history "The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History" (North Point, $24) presents these and other revelations about cleanliness, filth, and the gray areas in between. Ashenburg, a writer and lecturer who is best known for "The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die," here surveys, with great wit and insight, hygiene beliefs and practices from the ancient to the modern world. She spoke from Rochester, N.Y.

Q. When did you discover that Europeans simply lost the idea of bathing?

A. When I was reading about the 19th century, I realized that bathing was a lost art. The title of the book that an American doctor wrote - "Baths and How to Take Them" - that was deadly serious. I guess we just have a great capacity to forget.

Q. Where did that fear of water originate?

A. When the Black Death arrived in 1348 and the French king asked the medical faculty at the Sorbonne why this catastrophe was killing one in three people, and how to prevent it, a couple of the theories were familiar, that fat people and passionate people were more susceptible to the plague, for instance. But there was a new belief, that getting into warm water and opening your pores made you more susceptible. It was tragically bad advice, but it persisted in folk medicine for a very long time.

Q. What is your favorite crackpot theory or apparatus?

A. I still love the idea of what every European language calls "the linen that washes." You never had to get into water, you just had to put on a clean shirt. In the 17th century - and continuing into the 18th and 19th in some populations - they believed that the flax in linen drew out the sweat. Another crackpot theory is depicted in a Punch illustration that shows a 19th-century family lining up to take a hand-activated shower. They're all wearing large dunce caps because taking all that water on the head was believed to be dangerous. This cap diverted the water off your head. It was a safety measure.

Q. Have you heard the joke "Where does the Englishman keep his wallet? Under his soap"?

A. I've heard variations of that. But the French were generally quite happy to admit that the English were much cleaner, more interested in plumbing.

Q. Hence stinking Versailles?

A. One of my marginalia is an edict from the last years of Louis XIV's reign, that the feces left in the corners of the stairways had to be removed once a week. It seems to have been a Continental thing. An 18th-century English traveler named Arthur Young was disgusted when he went to the opera - in Italy I think - and men were [urinating] beside the orchestra pit in full view of ladies who had paid quite a lot for their tickets.

Q. So dirt wasn't a matter of class?

A. Not at all. When [William Makepeace] Thackeray invented the term "the great unwashed," it was a new way of distinguishing the poor from those with money and titles. Before that, when you kept your pores sealed against germs, it behooved everyone to keep the king dirtier than others, just to protect him.

Q. Who was the filthiest saint?

A. Well, Saint Agnes died without ever having had a bath. But she was only 13. There was Godric, who walked from England to Jerusalem without bathing, wearing a hair shirt. Back in his hermitage he wore special hair shirts that supported all sorts of lice. The early Christian church even had the word "alousia," which meant the virtue of staying dirty, of holy dirt.

Q. What happened when they encountered other faiths?

A. The Christians tried to explain away the cleanliness of Arabs by saying that people in hot climates had to wash themselves more. I wish I had more room in the book to write about Japan opening up in the 1850s, because the foreigners arriving in those black ships were the filthiest people the Japanese had ever seen. And when the Spaniards came to Latin America and Central America, the Indians couldn't believe how bad they smelled.

Q. Have Americans gone over the edge, and was that inevitable?

A. I think Americans are really over the edge. They were as dirty as Europeans until the Civil War, but it was always going to be easier for Americans to get clean. They had a vast new country, it was easier to put in plumbing, the housing norm in America became the house, not the apartment. And they loved gadgets and novelty. Then they had the amazing success in the Civil War with the Sanitary Commission created for the Union Army by [Frederick Law] Olmsted. I think America came out of the Civil War thinking that cleanliness was progressive, effective, egalitarian. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were crowding our shores and we needed to make them Americans by making them clean. Which is very much what the Romans felt about their colonies, by the way. Give them bathhouses and they too can become like civilized Romans. It was perfectly sensible. Today, though, I think American cleanliness has to do with controlling things. We don't want a body that gets dirty or smelly with time. But isn't there something psychologically unhealthy about feeling that we're not socially acceptable if we're more than three hours away from our last shower?

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.