Schuster-Wallace, C. and S. Watt. (2016). Of Religious Tomes and Tippy Taps. Solutions 7(6): 95-97. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/article/of-religious-tomes-and-tippy-taps/
Solutions in History
Of Religious Tomes and Tippy Taps by Corinne Schuster-Wallace and Susan Watt
Nigel Goodman
Victorian washbasins meet modern sanitation devices at Langtons House in East London, England.
P
ersonal hygiene is the practice of keeping your body clean, including your hands. Hygiene has aesthetic and moral (purity) dimensions in addition to health dimensions.1 Dating back to biblical times and beyond, societies have emphasized the importance of cleanliness of both people and the environment. Dirt was negatively construed, moving hygiene into the realm of morality.2 These hygiene practices came in the form of rules and laws in religious books,3 for example, for washing bodies, food preparation, and burial practices.4,5 A version of soap (a mixture of tallow and ash) was in use as early as 2300 BC.6 The 19th century heralded the use of disinfectants and antiseptics.7 As early as Roman times, hygiene became a social and cultural event,8 with hot and cold communal baths. The 1850s marked the start of a
sanitation revolution in Great Britain, catalyzed by the “Great Stink”—the smell of a sewage-ridden Thames River flowing past the Houses of Parliament.9 In the mid- to late-19th century, mortality rates fell as Western European and American societies transitioned to higher standards of social development. Improved hygiene is one of the key innovations behind this transition, with baths and laundry facilities being made widely available and frequently utilized. Personal cleanliness was linked to both health and morals. Inroads made were a result of a combination of technical, scientific, public health, social, and political advances.10 Personal hygiene has become a multi-million dollar industry, with soaps for bodies, hair, clothes, dishes, pets, and homes. It is synonymous with “good health, good manners, good rearing, good housekeeping, and
civilization itself.”11 It is estimated that there may be as many as 8,000 personal hygiene products sold in Europe alone.12 Around the world, these soaps and other personal care products are being flushed out into sewers and surface waters. Wastewater treatment processes are not necessarily sufficient to remove these pollutants from the effluent prior to its discharge back into receiving waters, facilitating bioaccumulation in some aquatic animals, and in some crops irrigated with recycled wastewater.13 Another potential adverse health effect is summarized by the “hygiene hypothesis,” which which suggests that, over time, decreased exposure to certain pathogens has had negative impacts on our immune responses, presumably increasing susceptibility to some pathogens. However, this is not so much a case of “too much hygiene,” as it is an emphasis on the importance of “good hygiene practice.”14 On the other hand, given the widespread development of antimicrobial resistance in pathogens (evolving resistance to antibiotics used to treat infections), there is a very real concern that excessive use of antibacterial products in healthy households may contribute to the development of resistant strains.15 However, over time, and with the drastic decreases in mortality rates associated with infectious diseases experienced in high income countries, complacency has led to the importance of hygiene for health being forgotten by many. The fact that historical rules and laws were likely borne out the negative consequences of not taking these actions on people’s health, such as pneumonia, scabies, and skin and eye infections, is no longer front of mind.16 Attention was drawn back to hygiene practices in 2010, when hygiene was referred to as one of the forgotten pillars of public health,17 answering a call for “renewal of the holistic approach
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