The Dirt on Clean Quotes

“Naturally, etiquette books order handwashing before as well as after meals, but the practice also appears, with a frequency that borders on obsession, in poetry. Poets found it hard to describe a banquet or even a meal without affirming that everyone washed their hands.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History

“The English word loo for toilet may come from (1) lieu à l’anglaise, the French term for toilet, or (2) Gardez l’eau! (Watch out for the water!), called to alert passersby that chamber pots were being emptied from upper-story windows into the street.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History

“Both dependent on large cultural and natural forces and intensely personal, because it concerns the body, cleanliness is always debatable. The ancient Greeks argued about cold- and hot-water bathing, sixteenth-century Europeans shunned water as much as possible except for the fortunate few who immersed themselves in spa waters, and nineteenth-century peasants (who now look like early believers in the Hygiene Hypothesis) clung to the proverbial powers of dirt as sanitarians tried to mend their ways.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“The so-called Hygiene Hypothesis, first voiced by Strachan, is that our immune system needs a certain amount of bacteria on which to flex its muscles. Deprived of it, the white cells that are designed to fight bacteria, called Th1 lymphocytes, fail to develop, and the other white cells, Th2 lymphocytes—those designed to make antibodies to defend the body against microbial dangers as well as to produce allergic reaction—will take over.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“On a very real level, germs concern us because the world has become a significantly more perilous place of late. In recent years, many normal activities, such as eating beef and chicken, travelling on public transit and being treated in a hospital, have turned out to be extremely dangerous in certain places. Arrogantly and ignorantly, we assumed that epidemics such as the Spanish flu of 1918 could not happen again. SARS proved us wrong, and now we dread bird flu or a yet unnamed pandemic.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“Deep at the bottom of all our sense of uncleanness, of dirt, is the feeling, primitive, irresolvable, universal, of the sanctity of the body. Nothing in the material sphere can properly be dirty except the body. We speak of a dirty road, but in an uninhabited world moist clay would be no more dirty than hard rock; it is the possibility of clay adhering to a foot which makes it mire.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“Just as the Cleanliness Institute closed its doors in 1932, a casualty of the stalled economy, Aldous Huxley published his satire of a sanitized utopia, Brave New World. It’s doubtful that Huxley, living in England, had heard of the Institute, although naturally enough there are parallels between its emphasis on indoctrination and social pressure and the vastly more extreme measures taken in the novel’s odour- and germ-phobic future civilization.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“Without an inherited caste system, Americans were looking for more egalitarian ways to define civility and mark status, and cleanliness, which was increasingly within the grasp of most Americans, turned out to be a good way to do that. Their success during the Civil War in controlling disease through hygiene led them to see it as progressive and civic-minded. They loved what was religious and patriotic, and by the last decades of the century, cleanliness had become firmly linked not only to godliness but also to the American way.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“Why did Americans take the lead? One answer is, because they could. Water mains and sewers were installed in new cities more easily than in ancient ones. With abundant, cheap land, houses with ample space for bathrooms became the domestic norm, in contrast to Europe’s old, crowded apartments. Because servants were always in short supply in democratic America, labour-saving devices were prized. High on the list was plumbing, and from the 1870s American plumbing outstripped that of every other country.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“The shower, more or less rudimentary, had been known to the ancient Greeks as well as to Montaigne and Madame de Sévigné, but the popular mind connected them with prisoners, soldiers and horridly cold water.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“Because the middle classes and the nouveaux riches welcomed gas, water closets and piped-in water, the upper classes drew back. Many a denizen of a sprawling, stony-cold country estate looked on “mod cons” as slightly uncouth, over-eager and—worst of all—middle-class.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“Somewhere around the beginning of the nineteenth century, people started becoming aware that the poor were dirtier than the well-off. Although that sounds like an obvious and ancient idea, it was in fact relatively new. 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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“Piped-in water on every floor and multiple water closets and baths had been feasible since the mid-eighteenth century, but few people, even prosperous ones, took advantage of the technology until a century later.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“When Dickens designed false bookcases and books to disguise the door from the drawing room to his study, he invented a seven-volume series facetiously called “The Wisdom of Our Ancestors.” In addition to volumes called Superstition, The Block, Ignorance, The Rack, Disease and The Stake, was one simply titled Dirt.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“Moors who converted to Christianity were not allowed to take baths, and a damning piece of evidence at the Inquisition, levelled against both Moors and Jews, was that the accused “was known to bathe.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“In Spain, the early Christian concerns about the corrupting influence of bathing and the late medieval worries about the plague were compounded by the Moorish occupation. Because the Moor was clean, the Spanish decided that Christians should be dirty.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“One of the Spaniards’ first actions during the Reconquest was to destroy the Moorish baths.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“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.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing

“the hamam remains the only living descendant of the Roman bathing tradition, and it was via the hamam that the Roman custom would return to medieval Europe.”
― Katherine Ashenburg, Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing