Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (review)

In this text Virginia Smith sets out to produce the twenty first century's general, but serious, history of hygiene. The title Clean might lead the reader into thinking the author is evaluating how well people in the past kept themselves pristine. Not so. Smith is more interested in evolving grooming practices, attitudes toward those practices, and their impact on the way people lived their lives than she is in judging past societies against some arbitrary standard of cleanliness. The text begins with the premise that cleanliness in personal hygiene is part of a complex set of grooming behaviors focused on enhancing the human body. These behaviors arise from the interaction of natural biological urges, which may have evolved both for health and psychological reasons, with technological developments and cultural mores. Together these three factors produce the unique practices of any individual society.

Writing in the tradition of European cultural history, Smith does an extraordinary job of unearthing disparate and scattered evidence about hygiene practices from prehistoric times to the present. From animal behavior studies, anthropological studies, cave paintings, and more modern art, advice literature, fiction, poetry, medical manuals, advertising, public health reports and so on, she gleans fascinating stories of grooming practices and the attitudes toward the body of those who came before us. Her speculative exploration of the role that basic biological imperatives may play in the development of hygienic behaviors is an intriguing and welcome addition to the literature on this subject. Though given the variety of human methods of meeting these imperatives, it seems the role that biology plays in the process may be considerably smaller than she asserts when she claims, "In extreme conditions humans still revert to their old animal survival skills, and we should perhaps take some comfort from the continued survival of our ancient coping mechanisms. Many of these are socially trained; but the most innate live continually inside us." (351)

The text is particularly strong in the way the author places the development of hygienic culture into its social and political context noting the connection between the overall ethos of an era and the kinds of hygiene discourse we get. Her effort to look at the entire picture of hygiene including bathing, cosmetics, dietary regimes, piercings, tattoos, exercise, fresh air and sun exposure reflects a strong understanding of the interdependence of cleaning and grooming with other practices aimed at exerting control over the human body. Her comprehensive look at the western experience of hygiene allows her to rightfully challenge a number of long held myths. For example, it was great to see her decimate the notion that medieval people lived crude, dirty lives, while still acknowledging how difficult it may have been for most people to free themselves of vermin. Smith's argument that nineteenth-century British Imperialists adapted the cleaning and hygiene practices of the indigenous peoples of Asia Minor and India was a delightful counter to the early twentieth century apologists who proclaimed conquest had a civilizing affect on the colonized in Pax Britannica. I am grateful that the text, aside from a brief mention of historical theory in the introduction, is not driven by some artificially imposed theory about social control and elite domination and that she acknowledges in the section on the nineteenth century Sanitarians that working people both understood the control issues involved in public plumbing efforts, and had their own reasons for wanting comfortable hygienic facilities for themselves. Indeed the chapters on Northern European and American hygiene in the Early Modern Period and the Nineteenth Century hygiene are the most focused in the book despite their lack of "Foucaultian" superstructure.

As with other cultural histories of this type, Smith's effort to provide a comprehensive picture of hygiene and purity practices may aim to do more than one text can possible accomplish. For example, she claims she is looking for "universal trends"(6) but provides very little information on anywhere outside the Indus Valley...