Hygiene

The development of hygiene and hygienic practices has been fundamental in preventing infections through cleanliness, and has also been very important in helping patients recover from ailments. On a personal level, it involves washing hands and the body with clean water. Domestic hygiene demands having a clean house environment, with occupational hygiene meaning that workers have a clean workplace. The word itself is derived from Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health and sanitation, who was known as Salus in the Roman Empire. As a word, it first appeared in French as hygiaine in 1597, and Salmon in 1671 noted that there were three speculative parts in medicine: physiology, hygiene, and pathology.

Knowledge about hygiene and cleanliness and the need for it was clearly evident in ancient times with references to it in a number of ancient Hindu texts such as the Hausmriti and the Vishnu Purana. Indeed bathing is one of the daily duties of Hindus, with the custom of washing in the Ganges River at Benares and elsewhere having great symbolic importance. Washing was also practiced by large numbers of ancient peoples with the Romans constructing large public bath houses, while wealthy Romans had their own private bath houses. These often involved a range of pools, some with hot water, and some with cool water, while there were also facilities for massage with oil or scraping the skin with a metal “strigil.” The water was kept fresh by use of the aqueduct. The most impressive of the baths in the Roman Empire were the Baths of Caracalla, in Rome, built from 216 C.E., to accommodate 1,600 bathers. In the New Testament of the Bible, the concept of baptism involves total immersion in water to cleanse one of sins, with Jesus also being involved in the washing of the feet, a practice that has continued into modern times in the Christian Church on Maundy Thursday (the last Thursday before Easter), with the Pope washing the feet of the subdeacons. The Koran prescribes a number of customs surrounding good hygiene, and Muslims wash their faces under running water, and their feet and hands at mosques.

As well as personal cleanliness, the cleaning of wounds has been found to be essential in helping them heal quickly. In Anglo-Saxon times in Britain and some parts of Europe, there was a custom of using honey to treat wounds, but by medieval times, it would found that the wound would heal much faster if washed in clean water.

Although it is now regarded as a healthy and hygienic practice to wash regularly, with many people having a shower at least once a day, this has not always been the case, and was not possible in much of the world where people did not have ready access to fresh water. Although people living near the sea and rivers were able to bathe easily, with the increase in population around the world, and the growth of cities, increasingly more people had to rely on water which was often not fresh. This led to outbreaks of disease such as cholera.

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