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The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History

By Katherine Ashenburg

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History Books

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History

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Description
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. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and using perfume to cover your own aroma as well as others', but never immersing yourself in water. Now we live in a deodorized world where sales of hand sanitizers and wipes are skyrocketing. Ashenburg's tour of history's baths and bathrooms reveals much about our changing and most intimate selves--what we desire, what we ignore, and what we fear.--From publisher description.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Publication Date:
2007
Publisher:
North Point Press
Languages:
Published: English
ISBN10:
0739498002
Weight:
381 g
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