17. Austrian peasant men courted by secreting a handkerchief in their armpits during a dance. When it was sufficiently sweaty, they wiped the face of their chosen girl with it – according to folk belief, she would be instantly smitten.
18. 16th-century French deodorant: “To cure the goat-like stench of armpits, it is useful to press and rub the skin with a compound of roses.”
19. Shortly before Louis XIV died in 1715, a new ordinance decreed that feces left in the corridors of Versailles would be removed once a week.
20. When John Wesley, the 18th-century founder of Methodism, coined the phrase “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” he was referring to clean clothes, not bodies.
21. The 18th-century advocates of cold-water bathing claimed it stirred the libido. One bather wrote:
Cold Bathing has this Good alone,
It makes Old John to hug Old Joan.
And gives a sort of Resurrection
To buried Joys, through lost Erection.
And does fresh Kindnesses entail
On a Wife Tasteless, Old, and Stale.
22. The bidet, although usually associated with France, was invented in Italy in the 16th century.
23. Nicknames for the bidet:
The hygienic little horse (Italy)
The hygienic guitar (Spain)
The violin case (France)
24. When the Master of a Cambridge college was urged to provide baths for the students in the early 19th century, he responded that there was no need, since “these young men are with us only for eight weeks at a time.”
25. French peasants believed that a strong body odour promised robust sexuality: one of their proverbs was “The more the ram stinks, the more the ewe loves him.”
26. American hotels vied to be the first to provide a bath with every room, and the winner was Buffalo’s Hotel Statler. In 1908, they advertised, “A Room and a Bath for a Dollar and a Half.”
27. Booker T. Washington aimed to teach African-Americans self-reliance through what he called “the gospel of the toothbrush.”
28. In the late 19th century, only three per cent of big-city American tenement apartments had bathrooms.
29. Ivory Soap’s famous advertising slogan, “It floats!”, came about accidentally: a worker left the soap’s mixing machine unattended, and the resulting lather floated as well as cleaned.
30. Listerine was invented as a surgical antiseptic and, without changing its formula, morphed over 40 years into an oral antiseptic, astringent and astonishingly successful mouthwash.
31. Kotex sanitary napkins began life as wood-fibre bandages for soldiers in World War One. The battlefield nurses used them as sanitary pads.
32. In 1931, halitosis was cited as grounds for divorce.
33. Almost one in four American houses built in 2005 had three or more bathrooms. And not just more bathrooms, but bigger ones: the average size of the American bathroom tripled between 1994 and 2004.
34. Seven hundred new antibacterial products were launched in America between 1992 and 1998. One of them is the “oral-care strip,” antimicrobial tape designed to be stuck to the tongue.
35. The increasingly respected “Hygiene Hypothesis” suggests that our rapidly rising incidence of allergies, asthma and other illness is due to over-cleanliness.
Are you worried about body odour? Click here for tips from a dermatologist on preventing it.
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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.
