The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [4]
Rites of passage and religion are not the only domains in which washing extends its reach beyond the bathroom. Until the late nineteenth century, therapeutic baths played a significant part in the Western medical repertoire, and they still do in eastern Europe. Observers often connect a culture’s cleanliness to its technological muscle. It’s true that plumbing and other engineering feats have made our modern standard of cleanliness possible, but technology usually follows from a desire rather than leads it: the Roman bathhouses had sophisticated heating and water-delivery systems that no one cared to imitate for centuries because washing was no longer a priority.
Climate, religion and attitudes to privacy and individuality also affect the way we clean ourselves. For many in the modern West, few activities demand more solitude than washing our naked bodies. But for the ancient Romans, getting clean was a social occasion, as it can still be for modern Japanese, Turks and Finns. In cultures where group solidarity is more important than individuality, nudity is less problematic and scrubbed, odourless bodies are less necessary. As these values shift, so does the definition of “clean.”
Because this book is a history of Western cleanliness, it only glances at the rich traditions of other cultures, usually as they revealed themselves to astonished European travellers, missionaries or colonizers. Before the twentieth century, Europeans usually found that prosperous Indian, Chinese and Japanese people washed themselves far more than was usual in the West. (In the case of Japan, every social level was well washed.) For their part, Indians and Asians considered Westerners puzzlingly dirty. To some extent, it was a matter of merocrine sweat glands, which Caucasians have in profusion while Asians have few or none. (Because of this, they can still find even clean Westerners very smelly.) Partly it was that Christianity’s emphasis on the spirit encouraged a certain neglect and disparagement of the physical side of life, and Christian teachings, unlike those of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, ignored hygiene. And partly the difference between West and East was that much of Europe took a long hiatus when it came to regular washing, roughly from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and non-Westerners who encountered Europeans in those centuries were often stunned by their abysmal hygiene.
The story of that hiatus was the germ of this book. Until a few years ago, I had a vague notion that after the Roman baths petered out, everyone was more or less filthy until perhaps the end of the nineteenth century. The world I imagined was very like Patrick Süskind’s description of eighteenth-century Paris in his novel Perfume, except that it went on unchanged for fifteen hundred or so years—an overwhelming, rank palimpsest of rotten meat, sour wine, grimy sheets, excrement and, above all, the look and smell of dirty human flesh. Then, one day in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, I paused in front of a picture of an eighteenth-century crowd. The caption underneath read, “The aristocrats in this picture are as dirty as the peasants. Press the button and learn more.”
That seemed to confirm my assumptions about the history of cleanliness, but I was willing to learn more, so I pressed