The Dirt on Clean
An Unsanitized History
For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a public two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, a scraping of the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the seventeenth-century aristocratic Frenchman, it meant changing his shirt once a day, using perfume to obliterate both his own aroma and everyone else’ s, but never immersing himself in – horrors! – water. By the early 1900s, an extraordinary idea took hold in North America – that frequent bathing, perhaps even a daily bath, was advisable. Not since the Roman Empire had people been so clean, and standards became even more extreme as the millennium approached. Now we live in a…
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October 28, 2008KATHERINE ASHENBURG is the author of several books and many magazine and newspaper articles. She has written for The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Toronto Life, among other publications. Her nonfiction books include The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die, and The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, which has been published in twelve countries and six languages. In former incarnations she was a producer at CBC Radio and was The Globe and Mail's Arts and Books editor. In 2018, she published her acclaimed debut novel, Sofie and Cecilia, and in 2021 she followed that work with the delightfully tart novel Her Turn.