Quotes from Katherine Ashenburg

since the royal body was the most precious body in the kingdom, and hence deserved the greatest protection from the dangerous assault of water, it is possible that James I of England and Philip V of Spain were dirtier than some of their subjects.

One of the English advantages when it came to hygiene, they theorized, was their religion: since Protestants (in their view) did not share their Catholic prudery about nudity, washing the body could be more straightforward and more thorough.

When the middle and upper classes feared water, roughly from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, they washed as little as peasants or the urban poor.

Since washing the body happened so seldom, it ceased to be a subject for painters. In place of the medieval woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts that pictured warmly sensuous bathhouse scenes came painterly odes to linen.

In Spain, the early Christian concerns about the corrupting influence of bathing and the late medieval worries about the plague were compounded by the Moorish occupation. Because the Moor was clean, the Spanish decided that Christians should be dirty.

Moors who converted to Christianity were not allowed to take baths, and a damning piece of evidence at the Inquisition, levelled against both Moors and Jews, was that the accused "was known to bathe.

The standard we read about in magazines and see on television is a sterilized and synthetic one, "as if we're not on this earth," a male friend remarked, but it takes some courage to disregard it.

The archetypal link between dirt and guilt, and cleanliness and innocence, is built into our language—perhaps into our psyches.

Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.

For the seventeenth century, clean linen was not a substitute for washing the body with water—it was better than that, safer, more reliable and based on scientific principles. White linen, learned men believed, attracted and absorbed sweat. As one wrote, with mystifying confidence, "We understand why linen removes the perspiration from our bodies, because the sweat is oleaginous or salty, it impregnates these dead plants [the

Christianity's relationship to the body and so to cleanliness was complicated. On the positive side, the body was intended to be a temple of God. Parts of it—the saliva of saints, for example, or the fluid that magically sprang from their breasts—could work miracles, or be worshipped, in the form of relics. At the same time, the body's potential for temptation provoked suspicion, if not hostility.

decade ago, the editorial writers at a large Canadian newspaper were amused when the germ-conscious editor-in-chief urged them to write an editorial against shaking hands. (He suggested crossing your arms and nodding instead.) The editorial never appeared. It's doubtful that the editor's suggestion would strike them as outlandish or exaggerated today.

Because the middle classes and the nouveaux riches welcomed gas, water closets and piped-in water, the upper classes drew back. Many a denizen of a sprawling, stony-cold country estate looked on "mod cons" as slightly uncouth, over-eager and—worst of all—middle-class.

The "rain bath," as the shower was called, was the simplest, quickest, cheapest, cleanest and withal best bath for people's bath houses; the one which requires the least space, the least time, the least amount of water, the least fuel for warming water, the least attendance, the least cost of maintenance. Standing

By the 1880s, however, something happened that no one could have predicted. The United States-rising, pushing and still raw in many ways—had become the Western country that most embraced the gospel of hygiene.

In 1829, when Boston's Tremont House opened its Greek Revival doors, the hotel world changed forever. Its innovations included individual patent locks on each of the 170 rooms, French cooking, gaslight in the public rooms and a substantial chunk

As to our baths, there is not much that we can say, for we only bathe twice a year, before Christmas and before Easter." —Ulrich, a monk of Cluny, ca. 1075

But the bathroom reached its current sybaritic levels only in the 1990s. Often, it's no longer the smallest room in the house. The average size of the American bathroom tripled between 1994 and 2004, and it's not uncommon to sacrifice a bedroom to make an extralarge bathroom.

children most likely to develop allergies and asthma were only children who lived in cities, did not go to daycare, had no pets, washed their hands more than five times a day and bathed more than once a day. The list of diseases possibly contracted in this way came to include rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis and even heart disease.

Nightingale had focused attention on the fact that deaths from disease and infection in wartime outnumbered those from gunshot wounds and that cleanliness could reduce those deaths.

Places with mineral springs had been called spas in honour of the famous hot springs of Spa, near Liège in Belgium, since the seventeenth century or before.)

Seven hundred new antibacterial products were launched in the United States between 1992 and 1998. One of them was the "oral-care strip," pieces of anti-microbial tape designed to be stuck to the tongue.

Deep at the bottom of all our sense of uncleanness, of dirt, is the feeling, primitive, irresolvable, universal, of the sanctity of the body. Nothing in the material sphere can properly be dirty except the body. We speak of a dirty road, but in an uninhabited world moist clay would be no more dirty than hard rock; it is the possibility of clay adhering to a foot which makes it mire.

According to Vincent Lam and Colin Lee, Toronto emergency room doctors and the authors of The Flu Pandemic and You, those straightforward, low-tech practices are about the only hygienic steps that might protect us in the next epidemic or pandemic.