The dirt on clean an unsanitized history

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...

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1. Verfasser: Ashenburg, Katherine (VerfasserIn)
Format: UnknownFormat
Sprache:eng
Veröffentlicht: New York North Point Press 2008
Ausgabe:First American paperback edition
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Online Zugang:Contributor biographical information
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Zusammenfassung: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
Beschreibung:Includes bibliographical references (pages 329-333) and index
Beschreibung:358 Seiten
Illustrationen
24 cm
ISBN:9780374531379
978-0-374-53137-9
0374531374
0-374-53137-4