From pre-historic grooming rituals to New Age medicine, from
ascetics to cosmetics, Clean looks at how different cultures have
interpreted and striven for personal cleanliness and shows how,
throughout history, this striving for purity has brought immense
social benefits as well as great tragedies.
Looking at human history through the lens of public baths,
lavatories, laundry, teeth cleaning, cosmetics, food storage and
panty liners, Virginia Smith here combines archeology, psychology,
biology, and other fields to illuminate our modern obsession
cleanliness. She peppers her entertaining account with engaging and
often surprising details. The book reveals, for instance, that even
at the earliest stages of human development, our bodies produced
pleasure-giving chemical opiates when things smelled or felt clean,
inducing us to bathe or at least remove dirty clothes. She
describes how, during the Bronze Age, an emerging hierarchy of
wealthy elites turned their love of grooming into an explosion of
the cosmetic and luxury goods industry, greatly affecting the
culture and economy of Eurasia and leading to advances in chemistry
and medicine. Likewise, in Greece and Rome, citizens focused much
of their leisure time on perfecting, bathing, or just writing about
the model athletic body. Even today, our enlightened medical
knowledge could not stop an onslaught of health remedies,
treatments, spas, and New Age nature cures--all in the pursuit of
purity.
This engrossing and highly original work will introduce you to the
customs and ideas of a myriad of cultures across centuries of human
history, providing a marvelous new perspective on the importance of
cleanliness to humancivilization.
"Utterly engaging."
--New York Times
"An authoritative and fascinating account of how hygiene has
transformed societies and how, sometimes, humanity's attempts to
scrub up can backfire."
--New Scientist
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