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 deodorized world where germophobes shake hands with their elbows and where sales of hand sanitizers, wipes and sprays are skyrocketing. Here are some interesting facts about the history of being clean.

1. Napoleon and Josephine were fastidious for their time in that they both took a long, hot, daily bath. But Napoleon wrote Josephine from a campaign, “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”

2. The ancient Egyptians went to great lengths to be clean, but both sexes anointed their genitals with perfumes designed to deepen and exaggerate their natural aroma.

3. The world’s earliest known bathtub, from around 1700 B.C., was found in the Queen’s apartments at the Palace of Knossos on Crete, and is made of painted terra cotta.

4. The Sybarites, a luxury-loving people who lived in southeastern Italy beginning in the 8th century B.C., invented the steam bath.

5. People rarely used soap to wash their bodies before the late 19th century. It was usually made from animal fats and ashes and was too harsh for bodies; the gentler alternative, made with olive oil, was too expensive for most people.

6. The Roman imperial baths were so gigantic that a single chamber – the hot room of the Baths of Caracalla – housed 20th-century productions of Aida that included chariots, horses and camels, as well as the cast and audience.

7. In Finland, where the sauna is a national institution, when government leaders cannot agree on an issue, they adjourn to the sauna to continue the discussion.

8. The accumulated sweat, dirt and oil that a famous athlete or gladiator scraped off himself was sold to his fans in small vials. Roman women reportedly used it as a face cream.

9. Recycling saintly secretions: St. Lutgard’s saliva was believed to heal the sick, as were the crumbs chewed by another medieval saint, St. Colette. A man sent from England to the Netherlands for St. Lidwina’s washing water, to apply to his afflicted leg. The water from St. Eustadiola’s face- and hand-washing cured blindness and other illnesses.

10. Medieval Christians proved their holiness by not washing. A monk came upon a hermit in the desert and rejoiced that he “smelt the good odour of that brother from a mile away.”

11. A monk from the monastery at Cluny reported, “As for our baths, there is not much that we can say, for we only bathe twice a year, before Christmas and before Easter.”

12. An “arsewisp” was what genteel medieval and Renaissance people cleaned themselves with after defecating – a fistful of hay or straw.

13. Teeth were cleaned in the middle ages and the Renaissance with green hazel twigs and woollen cloths.
 
14. Because so much sex went on in the public baths of the middle ages, the term “stew” or “stewhouse,” which originally referred to the moist warmth of the bathhouse, gradually came to mean a house of prostitution.

15. Elizabeth I of England owned a gold ear-pick, decorated with rubies.

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Excerpted from The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg. Copyright 2007 by Katherine Ashenburg. Excerpted with permission from Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced except with permission in writing from the publisher.