Quotes About Hygiene

But far more than the Jewish quarter or the bestequipped monastery, the cleanest corner of early medieval Europe was Arab Spain. Unlike in Christianity, cleanliness was an important religious requirement for the Muslim, and a ninth-century observer described the Andalusian Arabs as "the cleanest people on earth.

We are concerned about the environment, but we avoid thinking very much about the gallons of clean hot water we use every day and the toxins in our cleansers that we pour down the drain. Living up to our hygienic standards takes huge amounts of energy, but cleanliness is such a sacred cow that to be told "cut down on your washing" would be even more repugnant than being urged to restrict our driving.

Submerging the body in water while washing it was a lost practice, and people recovered it gropingly and tentatively. That a doctor would write an article in 1861 called "Baths and How to Take Them" may seem slightly comical to us, but her audience was grateful for professional guidance through unfamiliar territory.

During the sixteenth, seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, when people avoided water and believed that a clean linen shirt extracted dirt, there was little or no demand for toilet soap. The rich women who used it, mostly on face and hands, thought of it as more a cosmetic or perfume than a cleanser.

When the Viennese doctor Ignaz Semmelweis insisted that delivery room doctors and medical students wash their hands before attending their patients, he was ridiculed, even though the practice dramatically reduced death from puerperal sepsis. In 1865, when Semmelweis died, his simple but radical idea was still discounted.

The bath, except for medical reasons when absolutely necessary, is not only superfluous, but very prejudicial to men," the French doctor Théophraste Renaudot warned in 1655. "Bathing fills the head with vapors. It is the enemy of the nerves and ligaments, which it loosens, in such a way that many a man never suffers from gout except after bathing.

struck fear into medieval hearts—hot baths, which had a dangerously moistening and relaxing effect on the body. Once heat and water created openings through the skin, the plague could easily invade the entire body. For the next two hundred years, whenever the plague threatened, the cry went out: "Bathhouses and bathing, I beg you to shun them or you will die.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The second man I meet is Andrew, and he has dirty fingernails so I can't notice if he is nice or not. I can even eat my brown sugar and butter crêpes because, oy gevalt , I'm so distracted by these fingernails. I mean, what was he doing before he came on this date? Competitive gardening? Burying the last woman he dated?

The nurses deem the e-reader to be more sanitary than a paper book.

please disinfect before handling the infanta.

Ruby laughed. "Mrs. Morgan says people shouldn't use 'douchebag' in a negative way, because it turns a feminine hygiene product into a bad word. She says there's nothing wrong with a douchebag except that douching itself creates an unhealthy climate for a vagina.