Quotes from Katherine Ashenburg

even at the highest level: Elizabeth I of England bathed once a month, as she said, "whether I need it or not." But the seventeenth century raised the bar: it was spectacularly, even defiantly dirty. Elizabeth's successor, James I, reportedly washed only his fingers. The body odour of Henri IV of France (1553–1610) was notorious, as was that of his son Louis XIII. He boasted, "I take after my father, I smell of armpits.

Particularly in the East, in the fourth and fifth centuries, dirtiness became a uniquely Christian badge of holiness. This particular mortification of the flesh was known as alousia, "the state of being unwashed," and was largely chosen by hermits, monks and saints.

On a very real level, germs concern us because the world has become a significantly more perilous place of late. In recent years, many normal activities, such as eating beef and chicken, travelling on public transit and being treated in a hospital, have turned out to be extremely dangerous in certain places. Arrogantly and ignorantly, we assumed that epidemics such as the Spanish flu of 1918 could not happen again. SARS proved us wrong, and now we dread bird flu or a yet unnamed pandemic.