The Clean Body: A Modern History

by Peter Ward

How often did our ancestors bathe? How often did they wash their clothes and change them? What did they understand cleanliness to be? Why have our hygienic habits changed so dramatically over time? In short, how have we come to be so clean? The Clean Body explores one of the most fundamental and pervasive cultural changes in Western history since the seventeenth the personal hygiene revolution. In the age of Louis XIV bathing was rare and hygiene was mainly a matter of wearing clean underclothes. By the late twentieth century frequent - often daily - bathing had become the norm and wearing freshly laundered clothing the general practice. Cleanliness, once simply a requirement for good health, became an essential element of beauty. Beneath this transformation lay a sea change in understandings, motives, ideologies, technologies, and practices, all of which shaped popular habits over time. Peter Ward explains that what began as an urban bourgeois phenomenon in the later eighteenth century became a universal condition by the end of the twentieth, touching young and old, rich and poor, city dwellers and country residents alike. Based on a wealth of sources in English, French, German, and Italian, The Clean Body surveys the great hygienic transformation that took place across Europe and North America over the course of four centuries.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology

336 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2019

About the author

Peter Ward is a British business and technology reporter whose reporting has taken him across the globe. Reporting from Dubai, he covered the energy sector in the Middle East before earning a degree in business journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Economist, GQ, BBC Science Focus, and Newsweek.

Reviews

[Kathleen Garber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not interested in reading about history in the sense of wars or who was in charge of what country. However I am interested in the history of people (sociology) and how we acted or what we believed in the past. That’s more what this book is about and it was very interesting.

As I said, very interesting but also very detailed and full of information. The book was sometimes a little hard to follow or dry in certain places. However not enough to not make it a 5 star book. The rating shouldn’t be penalized because the author was thorough with his research. What’s interesting about this book about cleanliness throughout history is that the author doesn’t give only the US perspective or even the North American perspective. He includes sources and data from European nations as well.

The author, Peter Ward, covers the 17th century to the current year and boy did the definition of cleanliness change over that time. Peter covers bodily cleanliness from toileting, hand washing and bathing as well as how we clean our clothes. It’s interesting to note that in the 17th and 18th centuries I think it was, if you had pressed, clean white clothes on, you were considered clean, even if you hadn’t bathed in a year or more.

The book also starts with 12 photos, which are photos from the past that were found when researching the book and illustrate how cleanliness was looked upon at that time. The photos are referenced later in the book with an explanation of the photo and it’s meaning. You simply have to flip back to the beginning to get another look at them.

I previously read a children’s nonfiction book about bathing and cleanliness and found it interesting but this book was infinitely more in depth and covered so much more. I mean understandably of course since the other is children’s nonfiction but both books were interesting.

If you are an adult and you are interested in the history and sociology of how we cleaned or didn’t clean ourselves in the past, you will definitely want to read this book.

[Craig Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Clean Body: A Modern History by Peter Ward covered the habits of personal hygiene, or lack thereof, in Europe and North America from the nineteenth century onward. Ward was exhaustive in his coverage, not merely listing the products that were used, whether soap, shampoo, toothpaste and laundry detergent, but the social conditions and daily habits that led to the evolution in cleanliness practices. It would be hard to bathe regularly if your house wasn’t equipped with a private room; likewise those who lived in houses that didn’t even have running water were less likely to have a bath at all. Thus house design was influenced by this change in attitude towards personal hygiene.

Ward exposed the disparity between class and cleanliness, and also how urban and rural living affected one’s tendency to wash. Western society of the past fifty years has bred overall clean body habits, where the majority of people shower or bathe, brush their teeth and wash their hair every single day. This was unheard of two hundred years ago. The bathing habits back then focussed on washing only the skin that was exposed, so people concentrated on their faces and hands. There was a disconnect between hygiene and good health. This changed as scientific discoveries proved the connection between uncleanliness and disease. Early soap advertisements promoted good health as the result of using their products. Now with all people taking a daily shower and washing their hands we do not need to promote health via hygiene. The advertising of today promotes clean bodies as more attractive and desirable than healthy, thus aesthetics is the new goal of hygiene. Yet by the 1800’s:

“Before the end of the nineteenth century, then, the idea of regular bathing had come to be embedded in leading notions of hygiene. The German hygienic reformer Oscar Lassar established it as the defining goal of his crusade during the 1880s, and he was only one of many champions of cleanliness for whom it became a core objective. Public bath promoters like Lasser [sic] wished to imbue the lower classes with bourgeois standards of body care: the new hygiene would improve the habits of the poor, animate their sense of self-control, and uplift their physical and moral condition. Bathing was a discipline that, once accepted, would prompt them to embrace the duty of their own body care and, in turn, their own general welfare. Many proponents wrapped the cause in the rhetoric of advancing social progress.”

Thus cleanliness, a characteristic of only the rich–who after all could afford the time and space to bathe–was promoted among the lower classes. Ward often described how slowly it was for new hygiene habits to become regular, and western Europe lagged behind the squeaky-clean USA. The author supplemented the text with figures and tables that showed washing machine usage, time spent doing laundry work, and soap and detergent consumption to back up these claims.

I needed two weeks to finish this book. Its 66 pages of endnotes–in a book that was only 308 pages long, excluding the index–made for a tiring read at times. As one who always reads notations such as endnotes, footnotes, acknowledgements and the bibliography, facing these 66 pages was daunting. The Clean Body was a slow read though meticulously researched. You might end up shaking your head wondering how people a couple centuries ago managed to stand each other living amongst the literal unwashed. I suppose mutual stink cancelled the others out.

[Shira Sanghvi · Rating 4 out of 5]

though i love sociological history, this took me ages to get through. the history of cleanliness in the west is fascinating, but i frequently got bogged down by all the statistics. at times felt like reading a textbook? difficult to just sit and read for hours, but happy to have read it

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scholarly and engaging history of popular attitudes and trends regarding personal hygiene from the seventeenth century to the present day. The author focuses on Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, France and Italy, comparing and contrasting how quickly regular bathing, plumbing and frequent laundry were adopted in each country. (Apparently thrifty post-war Canadians held on to their old washing machines for some time even when automatic models came into vogue in the United States) There is a strong focus on how urbanization contributed to the transformation in attitudes toward personal hygiene - ideas of dirt as beneficial lasted longer in rural areas. In the last paragraph, there's a brief reference to how there is once again evidence that a little less cleanliness might be beneficial for building immunity and it would have been interesting to read the author's thoughts on these ideas.

[Kate M · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting social history review of our hygenic habits through the ages. Focusing on western Europe and North America, the author reviews how and why our personal habits changed so dramatically over time, from our ancestors who never bathed, rarely washed and only cleaned their underclothes (if that). Essentially it was a combination of social ambition, consumerism and a shift to city living that changed our habits.
An interesting read but a somewhat repetitive.

[Evan Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating look at human hygiene throughout the centuries, especially since the 1600’s. Ward writes with a keen eye and gives the reader an enjoyable ride. Fun read!