Hygiene historian's unique insight to the Coronavirus discussion

By: Marissa DeCuir
Books Forward President & Partner

With all this renewed public discussion and focus on personal hygiene, Peter Ward offers a shutter-inducing look back at how our ancestors bathed, how often they washed their clothes, what they understood cleanliness to be, and why our hygienic habits have changed so dramatically over time.

Ward's book The Clean Body: A Modern History (from McGill-Queen's University Press), provides facts on the hygiene revolution spanning four centuries.

And as the Coronavirus has everyone thinking about washing their hands for at least 20 seconds, he follow his book release with some fresh (no pun intended!) commentary around the history of hand washing in particular:

Before the 19th century, the only parts of the body that were washed occasionally were those not covered by clothing, i.e. faces and hands. That changed gradually over time amongst the upper and middle classes, but it remained common in rural places and among the urban poor until well after World War I. The most common reason for a face wash, in particular, was to prepare for church on Sunday.

Hand washing is one of those very mundane things that people didn’t record much before the mid 19th century. The book mentions Louis XIV, who washed his hands in scented water every morning. Over the years many also probably washed or wiped them when they were mucky, sticky etc. because dirty fingers were awkward to use or soiled their fine clothes. But we know scarcely anything at all about the subject.

Clean hands didn’t gain a new meaning until well into the 19th century. In an 1843 paper the American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes (also a noted poet and father of the Supreme Court Justice of the same name) was among the first to suggest an association between unwashed hands and puerperal fever, one of the major causes of maternal mortality in the pre-germ theory years. But he didn’t pursue the idea beyond this paper. In the 1860s Ignac Semmelweis and Joseph Lister pushed the idea along, the former with no immediate impact, the latter with quite a bit more, at least in medical circles. From the early 1880s onward, as Pasteur's germ theory became every more widely accepted, hand washing developed the scientific justification that it still has today. Over time it became one of the basic messages of medical practice, public health campaigns, and child rearing advice. (See the discussion in the book, pp. 135-138 and the rest of the chapter.)

Even then, though, it took decades for hand washing routines to become clearly defined and near-universal and the results we know today were the product of generations of sustained education, in families, in schools, in organizations for children & youths, in public health crusades, in times of crisis like this one. We’ve become accustomed to seeing dispensers for hand washing fluids in many public place, especially hospitals, but these are quite new. I think they date from the SARS epidemic about 15 years ago. I’ve run into several surveys of hand washing frequencies in public places, airports mostly, that keep track of those who wash/don’t wash after using the toilet. (Can’t imagine the creepiness of the information gathering process!) And I’ve attached the famous Gary Larson cartoon just for randomness. Who would have thought it funny a century ago? And why does it seem funny now? Or does it?