“Cleanliness is next to godliness”, or so the saying used to go. These days, cleanliness, or hygiene, is just part of the daily routine: brush your teeth, take a shower, wash your clothes; use hand sanitizer, deodorant, sugar-free dental chewing gum, wet tissues, air freshner, super suction vacuum cleaners…whatever you do don’t let the kids play in the mud, and so on.
The Greek’s had their own expression: hugieine tekhne or, the ‘art of health’. The hugieine derives from hugies, ‘healthy’, which passed into modern Latin to become hygieina, then to French for our modern word ‘hygiene’. Perhaps for the Greeks, hygiene was the most important element to consider in the approach to medicine, as Sir John Pentland Mahaffy wrote in 1874: “Greek medicine rather started from hygiene than from pathology” (Social Life Greece); that is to say, the Greeks focused on ways to stay healthy rather than diagnosing disease.
Hygienic inventions
Toilet
Sir John Harington invented the forerunner to Britain’s modern flush toilet and installed it in his manor in Kelston. He called his the Ajax, since a ‘jake’ was slang for toilet. He wrote a book on it in 1596 which proved very popular, but it’s his name John that would become the lasting U.S. slang word for this essential piece of equipment.
Toothpaste
Many of the ancient civilisations were using some kind of powder-based toothpaste— ashes of ox hooves, chalk, charcoal. Incredibly, it was not until the 1850s that Crème Dentifrice came along: powder changed to cream, and in the 1809s Colgate put it in a tube and never looked back.
But all this hygiene is good for us, isn’t it? To an extent. Current theories suggest that our modern, rigorous approach to hygiene (the attempt to eliminate germs in our environments) could be reducing the number of germs our immune system has to cope with and this might explain why more and more people each year are beginning to suffer with allergies. Despite companies that try to sell us a love affair with their chemicals, are we actually becoming too hygienic?
