Cleanliness Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
August 11, 2020 at 12:50 a.m.
By Max [email protected]
Another book written earlier about hand washing entitled “The HandBook: Surviving in a Germ Filled World,” by Miryam Wahrman is also worth reading. This book describes why clean hands can minimize the transmission of many diseases. Hand hygiene can be a life-and-death issue in hospitals, but it also sickens people in other settings on a daily basis, when germs are transferred from person to person, from hands to surfaces and back again to hands. In an earlier column, I described how proper and frequent handwashing is one of the major ways to reduce the transmission of coronavirus 2019.
Ms. Wahrman reports that religious handwashing has been around for thousands of years in Islamic, Jewish and other cultures, but the notion of disease spreading by hand has been part of the medical belief system for only about 130 years.
However, the first recorded discovery of handwashing’s life saving power came 50 years earlier, in 1848, as a huge, unwelcome shock. This was the year that Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician practicing at a hospital in Vienna, Austria, proposed using chorine solutions to wash surgeon’s hands and instruments prior to child birth.
After Semmelweis implemented hand hygiene, the rate of mortality dropped from 18% to about 1%. Unfortunately, his idea faced great resistance from other doctors and Semmelweis met a tragic end. He became despondent, and died in a psychiatric institution at age 47. Over the next 40 years, an understanding of germs developed, and attitudes to hygiene gradually shifted.
After Robert Koch discovered the anthrax bacillus in 1876, and new research in medical bacteriology, surgeons began handwashing in earnest.
Peter Ward in his book believes that the development of modern personal hygiene has been one of the great cultural transformations in the Western world over the past two centuries.
With passing time, older habits of body care have gradually given way to new ones and in turn these have yielded to still newer ones. Each generation of customs has been more scrupulous than the one it replaced, each has expressed a new engagement with the self and its social relations. Past beliefs about cleanliness were embedded in understandings about the body and its care widely held in their times.
Then as now, popular notions were based on contrasts between clean and unclean, though the specific meanings of the two terms differed greatly from those we now accept. The concept of the clean body is a construct, one that has evolved slowly over time. It has found its clearest expression at the level of practice, for hygienic customs inevitably reflect the sensibilities of their era. From the 17th century onward new beliefs about care of the body came to shape the progress. There has been a major shift about cleanliness in the past three centuries and the forces that pushed those shifts including the relationship between cleanliness and social advancement, germ theory and the health movement that created public baths, hygiene education in schools, and consumer trends.
By the early 20th century, the majority of the population has come to accept the truth of the new hygiene, and those who had not soon would. By this time, too, cleanliness had become a commercial product, widely advertised and sold in the flourishing consumer markets of the Western world. As it remains today.
In “Clean,” James Hamblin explores the science and culture of cleanliness and what it means to be clean. He notes that most of our standards for cleanliness are less related to health than people think. The book describes the skin microbiome — the trillions of microbes that live on our skin and in our pores. Additionally, Mr. Hamblin explores the relationship between skin complaints and immune system issues; the total abdication of federal cosmetics regulations: the weirdness of one soap maker’s corporate scene; the pseudoscience of skin-care products; the biology of the skin microbiome; and the problematic antimicrobials in soaps and other products. There is also some important news debunking manufacturer’s cosmetic claims. The book explores the ongoing, radical change in the way we think about our skin.
Final Thoughts
John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of Methodism, wrote in one of his sermons that “Cleanliness is, indeed, next Godliness.” All of the books described above suggest that the definition of personal cleanliness has changed many times over the centuries, thanks to evolving attitudes toward sex and beauty, increased access to water, advances in indoor plumbing, and microbiology.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. His new book “Science Snippets” is available from Amazon and other book sellers. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
Another book written earlier about hand washing entitled “The HandBook: Surviving in a Germ Filled World,” by Miryam Wahrman is also worth reading. This book describes why clean hands can minimize the transmission of many diseases. Hand hygiene can be a life-and-death issue in hospitals, but it also sickens people in other settings on a daily basis, when germs are transferred from person to person, from hands to surfaces and back again to hands. In an earlier column, I described how proper and frequent handwashing is one of the major ways to reduce the transmission of coronavirus 2019.
Ms. Wahrman reports that religious handwashing has been around for thousands of years in Islamic, Jewish and other cultures, but the notion of disease spreading by hand has been part of the medical belief system for only about 130 years.
However, the first recorded discovery of handwashing’s life saving power came 50 years earlier, in 1848, as a huge, unwelcome shock. This was the year that Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician practicing at a hospital in Vienna, Austria, proposed using chorine solutions to wash surgeon’s hands and instruments prior to child birth.
After Semmelweis implemented hand hygiene, the rate of mortality dropped from 18% to about 1%. Unfortunately, his idea faced great resistance from other doctors and Semmelweis met a tragic end. He became despondent, and died in a psychiatric institution at age 47. Over the next 40 years, an understanding of germs developed, and attitudes to hygiene gradually shifted.
After Robert Koch discovered the anthrax bacillus in 1876, and new research in medical bacteriology, surgeons began handwashing in earnest.
Peter Ward in his book believes that the development of modern personal hygiene has been one of the great cultural transformations in the Western world over the past two centuries.
With passing time, older habits of body care have gradually given way to new ones and in turn these have yielded to still newer ones. Each generation of customs has been more scrupulous than the one it replaced, each has expressed a new engagement with the self and its social relations. Past beliefs about cleanliness were embedded in understandings about the body and its care widely held in their times.
Then as now, popular notions were based on contrasts between clean and unclean, though the specific meanings of the two terms differed greatly from those we now accept. The concept of the clean body is a construct, one that has evolved slowly over time. It has found its clearest expression at the level of practice, for hygienic customs inevitably reflect the sensibilities of their era. From the 17th century onward new beliefs about care of the body came to shape the progress. There has been a major shift about cleanliness in the past three centuries and the forces that pushed those shifts including the relationship between cleanliness and social advancement, germ theory and the health movement that created public baths, hygiene education in schools, and consumer trends.
By the early 20th century, the majority of the population has come to accept the truth of the new hygiene, and those who had not soon would. By this time, too, cleanliness had become a commercial product, widely advertised and sold in the flourishing consumer markets of the Western world. As it remains today.
In “Clean,” James Hamblin explores the science and culture of cleanliness and what it means to be clean. He notes that most of our standards for cleanliness are less related to health than people think. The book describes the skin microbiome — the trillions of microbes that live on our skin and in our pores. Additionally, Mr. Hamblin explores the relationship between skin complaints and immune system issues; the total abdication of federal cosmetics regulations: the weirdness of one soap maker’s corporate scene; the pseudoscience of skin-care products; the biology of the skin microbiome; and the problematic antimicrobials in soaps and other products. There is also some important news debunking manufacturer’s cosmetic claims. The book explores the ongoing, radical change in the way we think about our skin.
Final Thoughts
John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of Methodism, wrote in one of his sermons that “Cleanliness is, indeed, next Godliness.” All of the books described above suggest that the definition of personal cleanliness has changed many times over the centuries, thanks to evolving attitudes toward sex and beauty, increased access to water, advances in indoor plumbing, and microbiology.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. His new book “Science Snippets” is available from Amazon and other book sellers. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
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