Is good personal hygiene a recent invention?
Dear Cecil: To hear a lot of people tell it, up until some indeterminate date in the 20th century, everyone in Europe and the United States stank to high heaven. Supposedly no one washed, brushed their teeth, etc; everyone had lice; and so on. Is it true that the average 12th-century European, if he showed up in a modern room, could clear out the joint by stench alone in three seconds? Were lice the social norm? Would everyone’s rotting-tooth breath knock us on our asses? If so, at what point did matters improve? I’m imagining myself transported back in time to a room where the Founding Fathers are debating what to do about the Crown’s injustices, and almost passing out from the stink. What makes me skeptical that hygiene was so awful is that I often read of someone being particularly malodorous; if everything already stank horrifically, then how could people tell that someone had BO? Who had grounds to nitpick anyone else’s pungency? — Jonathan, via e-mail Come on, Jonathan–a little
