The Dirt On Clean An Unsanitized History Katherine Ashenburg by Katherine Ashenburg 9780307368362, 030736836X instant download after payment.

A spirited chronicle of the West's ambivalent relationship with dirt
The
question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with
confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour
soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a
miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic
Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a
day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did
Napoleon know something we didn't when he wrote Josephine "I will return
in five days. Stop washing"? And why is the German term Warmduscher—a
man who washes in warm or hot water—invariably a slight against his
masculinity? Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as
these in Dirt on Clean, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time.
What
could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing
yourself? And yet cleanliness, or the lack of it, is intimately
connected to ideas as large as spirituality and sexuality, and
historical events that include plagues, the Civil War, and the discovery
of germs. An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, Dirt on Clean
considers the bizarre prescriptions of history's doctors, the hygienic
peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that
have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet
oversanitized.