The other day I heard Katherine Ashenburg being interviewed on the radio. I have never heard of her before, she has written among others a book called “The Dirt on Clean”. It is described as An Unsanitised History. It tells of how people through the ages have dealt with or not dealt with their personal hygiene. From a Roman who spent two hours a day in a public bath of various temperatures, scraped his skin with a small rake and ended his ablutions by rubbing oil on his skin. To the seventeenth century French aristocrat who would change his shirt once a day and apply perfume to hide his smell and that of everyone around him but never, never immersing himself in water. Different cultures have different ideas about what is required to make oneself acceptable to you family and friends.
Ms. Ashenburg seems to have done a great deal of research for her book and hearing her talk of it has made me want to read it and so I am on the lookout for a copy. Another point that was brought up in the interview was how many doctors in Northern America are now thinking that we have for the most part over done the whole cleansing thing. Not only do we bath or shower at least once a day but we use strong soaps and detergents to wash away our dirt, our aroma and maybe even our immune systems. There are people who believe that the rise in asthma and allergic reactions is because we have no natural immunity any more, we have washed it all away. My mother had told me when I was a child that “You’ll have to eat a ton of dirt before you die” so a bit of dirt has never really bothered me, particularly good clean dirt like soil. In our house if food was dropped on the floor it was picked up, wiped and eaten. And we certainly did not adhere to the ‘3 seconds’ rule. I don’t suppose we had ever even heard of it. I can see the sense in sterilising babies’ bottles but once an infant is crawling around on the floor and putting his grubby hands and anything else he can find into his mouth I feel that sterilising is rather superfluous. I remember a young mother that I was in hospital with when we both had our first babies. We would visit each other when the babies were small and she was still sterilising his bottles when he was about a year old. Poor child was always sick, more than the usual runny noses that toddlers always seem to have but coughs and all sorts of other infections. Whereas my son was never really sick, he was just a toughie. I suppose he had to be tough to survive a mother like me. I read once that the high rate of polio after the war was because we had learnt to be clean but we had gone too far and had no resistance to the polio virus. I don’t know if that is true but it would not surprise me.
Someone on the radio programme about Katherine Ashenburg’s book mentioned a doctor who believed that if we just stopped the washing at the wrists we would be much better off. He said that keeping our hands clean is necessary to stop the spreading of germs but he thought that if we left it at that we would be healthier.
When I see the huge assortment of products we use to keep ourselves clean I can’t help wondering what happened to the good old bar of soap and a face cloth. One product to wash our hair another for our face, another for our body and yet another for our hands. All to ensure that we don’t have a “problem that our best friend would not tell us about”. I think that personal hygiene products could very well be out done by household cleaning products. Things that kill 99% of ‘all known household germs’. Oh dear should I now be worrying about all the ‘unknown household germs’? Things that sterilise, sanitise and deodorise, that take away that dreaded smell of cooking. Burnt food is not too pleasant a smell but what is wrong with bacon and onions frying early on a Sunday morning or a cake in the oven or that wonderful evocative smell of fresh bread. I feel I should be trying to make my kitchen smell inviting not trying to get rid of all the smells. Beware! It’s all a great big con by the manufactures who just want to sell more and more products and get richer and richer. Everywhere I look I see evidence that the world is going crazy. Or maybe I am just getting old.
By the way, I have manage to find a copy of The Dirt on Clean from a wonderful Web page called BetterWorldBooks.com for $13.77 postage free. As our local book shop wanted to charge me over $40 I will be happy to wait the few weeks that it will take to arrive from America.
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