The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (review)

The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life. Nancy Tomes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 345. $29.95 (cloth).

Have you ever stopped to wonder, while making your bed, why you fold the top sheet over the blanket? Nancy Tomes traces the genealogy of that and similar rituals to Americans' obsession with germs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like many contemporary studies of the fascination with emerging infections, The Gospel of Germs links the present moment to the rise of bacteriology as a popular science at the turn of the previous century. Tomes, however, is specifically concerned with exposing the genesis, logic, and consequences of everyday rituals. The practice of folding six or eight inches of sheet over blankets just below the pillow, for example, began in hotels as a sign of cleanliness. While germs might accumulate on the unlaundered blankets, the more easily washed sheets meant a germ-free night for travelers seeking rest in hotels or Pullman cars. That half foot or so of characteristically white sheet became the signature of careful housekeeping, and any housewife worthy of the name could not possibly offer less to her own family. As we dutifully fold the sheet or blow our noses in a disposable paper tissue or purchase a sanitary pad from a dispenser conveniently located in a public washroom, we are participating in rituals that, explains Tomes, mark our unwitting adherence to "the gospel of germs."

Tomes documents in vivid detail and lively prose the struggles through which the United States public gradually came to believe in the invisible world of microbes and how their lives changed accordingly. From public health officials committed to the containment, or at least management, of contagious disease to entrepreneurs who saw a chance to capitalize on the new science to sell their products, Americans were inundated during this period with accounts of the existence and dangerous consequences of "germs." It was a "leap of faith," explains Tomes, that "Americans . . . conditioned to believe in an 'invisible world' dominated by unseen forces that held the power of life and death" were prepared to make (7). With the phrase "the gospel of germs," she calls attention to a belief system, a faith both in the existence of invisible co-travelers and in the ability of science and medicine to identify and control them. A particular conception of the expert and new ideas about the government's responsibility for public health and about the authority of public health officials emerge from this period. Tomes, however, leaves the debates about those new ideas to others, focusing instead on the processes through which "scientific precepts become a part of the working hypothesis of everyday life" (14).

That focus is precisely what makes the book so engaging. A variety of concerns and motivations constituted the gospel of germs, and Tomes brings a range of historical approaches--social, material, and cultural--to bear on this study of culture. From their earliest confrontations with pathogenic life-forms in their laboratories, Tomes's "apostles of the germ" (23) and the public health officials who followed their lead sought to get the message out to the wealthy in their "whited sepulchers" and to the impoverished in their infested tenements (48). Lives and social justice alike were at stake, and Tomes explores the material changes that resulted from the discovery of the microbes. The message was not divorced from ideology. If cleaning one's house helped to minimize the spread of disease, for example, it also signaled the acceptance of specific cultural markers associated as much with Americanness as with cleanliness. A home should not simply be clean, it should look clean; stains on the floor corresponded to blights on the character. And while cleanliness was supposed to be as much a male as a female attribute, a dirty house--then as now--meant a careless (and morally...