Review Roundup – Peter Ward’s ‘The Clean Body: A Modern History’

In The Clean Body: A Modern History, Peter Ward refuses to acknowledge bathing as a perennial, inconsequential routine. The author enthusiastically challenges the banality of the bath, examining the radical and recent shift in common conceptions of health that precipitated the personal hygiene revolution. Rigorously analyzing factors such as soap advertising and changing beauty standards in different European and North American countries, Ward offers an unparalleled study of what it means to be clean.

The book has drawn praise from several media sources, and we have compiled recent reviews, excerpts, and author interviews to celebrate this unique history of hygiene.

Peter Ward is professor emeritus of history at the University of British Columbia and the author of several books on the social history of Canada and the history of population health.

Peter Ward comes clean on the last 400 years or so of personal cleanliness (The Vancouver Sun, 13 December 2019)

By Dana Gee

As Ward points out, a discussion of bathing can easily begin with a look at the Roman baths and the history that followed. But, according to the University of B.C. professor emeritus, some very interesting, nuanced history ends up getting thrown out with the bathwater if you take that broad of an approach. With that in mind, Ward decided to narrow his purview and focus his research on the last 400 years or so. Continue reading >

Lather, rinse, repeat: History of human hygiene habits traced to present-day pursuit of cleanliness (Winnipeg Free Press, 7 December 2019)

By Vanessa Warne

Generally speaking, The Clean Body is a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion of practices that we would be mistaken to think of as natural or normal. Its study of centuries of hygiene is a prompt for us to reconsider our present-day pursuit of cleanliness. Continue reading >

Do we really need that daily bath? Author dishes the dirt on history of hygiene (5 December 2019)

By Ian McGillis

As The Clean Body makes clear, the hygiene revolution was tied in with the rise of consumerism and its concomitant exploitation of natural resources — things that have contributed greatly to our current environmental tipping point. Continue reading >

Cleaning up the masses: When cleanliness became a phenomenon (excerpt, The Star, 1 December 2019)

The twentieth century saw a wholesale transformation in popular hygiene throughout the Western world. The very concept of cleanliness itself was redefined. Routine washing and bathing habits replaced older, more intermittent practices, and customs once shared only by the few were adopted by the many. Continue reading >

Why Pilgrims Arriving in America Resisted Bathing (21 November 2019)

By Becky Little

Both rich and poor might wash their faces and hands on a daily or weekly basis, but almost no one in western Europe washed their whole body with any regularity, says Ward. The Separatist Pilgrims and the Puritans who followed them may have even thought that submerging their whole body in water was unhealthy, and that taking all of their clothes off to do so was immodest. Continue reading >

The History of Personal Hygiene: An Interview with Peter Ward (17 November 2019)

Interview with Aleisha Smith

The Clean Body is a history of habits. It’s a history of the mundane, the everyday, a history without great events, great ideas and great actors. Its chief importance lies in the fact that it deals with some of life’s most commonplace activities. But commonplace doesn’t mean trivial. … [T]he history of the unremarkable and the ordinary have an importance of their own, one that can easily surpass the history of greatness in any of its many forms. Continue reading >

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