hygiene

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Dictionary: hy·giene (hī'jēn') pronunciation

The science that deals with the promotion and preservation of health. Also called hygienics.
Conditions and practices that serve to promote or preserve health: hygiene in the workplace; personal hygiene.

[French hygiène and New Latin hygieina, both from Greek hugieinē (tekhnē), (art) of health, feminine of hugiēs, healthy.]

hygienist hy·gien'ist (hī-jē'nĭst, hī'jē'-, hī-jĕn'ĭst) n.

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World of the Body: hygiene

The word hygiene derives from the name of the ancient Greek goddess of healthful living, Hygeia. Initially worshipped in her own right, by the fifth century bce in Athens Hygeia was instead depicted as a demi-god, the daughter or wife of the god of healing, Asclepius. While worship of Asclepius aimed at curing disease through divine intercession, worship of Hygeia emphasized obtaining health by living wisely in accordance with her laws. In contemporary Western society the concept of hygiene has become associated with standards of personal grooming which often have little effect on individual health.

Historical background

Hygiene in the earliest sense was not connected to cleanliness or personal grooming. Indeed popular attitudes in Western Europe and the US held that frequent bathing was dangerous to individual health. It upset the physical system, robbed the body of precious natural oils, and led to debilitating illness. Though individuals such as Benjamin Franklin urged cleanliness as a necessary component of healthful living, the plumbing technology required to make this easy was underdeveloped and expensive. Travellers in Europe and the US during the early nineteenth century frequently commented on the filthy conditions both of persons and households. One historian has suggested that, in a largely agricultural community, the dirt of honest labour was associated with both economic and physical well-being, an outlook that applied to both peasant cultures in Europe and yeoman farm life in the US.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the repeated onslaught of diseases such as cholera began to alter people's understanding of personal hygiene. Since orthodox medicine seemed powerless in response to these pandemics, a variety of alternative medicines gained popularity. Many of these alternatives emphasized disease prevention through healthful living, which included diet and clothing reform, daily cold water bathing, exercise, regulation of bowel movements, and abstinence from coffee, tea, alcohol, and sex. In their attack on heroic medicine, reformers emphasized personal and domestic responses to health crises.

For these reformers, living hygienically was essential both because it led to physical well-being, and because it revealed proper moral character. Catherine Beecher, the most prominent domestic advice author of the mid-nineteenth-century US, propounded this view of hygiene. In Letters to the People on Health and Happiness she called her hygiene precepts, ‘… laws of health and happiness, because our Creator has connected the reward of enjoyment with obedience to these rules, and the penalty of suffering with disobedience to them’.

Florence Nightingale, in her efforts to reform English hospital care, provided the most cogent arguments linking personal and public hygiene with good health and morals. Like many of her contemporaries, Nightingale believed that unhealthy living made individuals susceptible to contagion. She rejected germs as a specific causal agent, however, asserting that dirt, sewer gases, and other environmental contagion produced illness. Nightingale's system for training nurses reflects this belief, and Nightingale nurses cleaned the patient and created order in the hospital. Nightingale is, therefore, a transitional figure linking the idea that the individual has a moral responsibility to live healthfully with a desire to control external threats to individual health.

As Western society became more urban and industrial, the disorderliness of city life seemed to threaten the health of even the most dedicated follower of Beecher's ‘laws of health and happiness’. Gradual acceptance of the germ theory compounded the fear that right living alone could not prevent illness. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica reflects this attitude by asserting that hygiene embraces ‘all the agencies which affect the physical and mental well-being of man.’ Hygiene as a system included not only personal hygiene related to food, clothing, exercise, cleanliness, and sexual control, but also sciences such as engineering, meteorology, bacteriology, and public sanitation and waterworks.

Since social health required both environmental cleanliness and hygienic behaviour on the part of the masses, reformers sought to extend private middle-class standards of hygiene into the public arena by reforming garbage collection, water delivery, and sewage disposal. They also sought to change the behaviours of the lower classes. In the US the effort to transmit hygienic practices to the masses was inextricably linked to Americanization. The goal was to lift so-called ‘dirty foreigners’ to middle-class American standards. The lessons of hygienic living were first taught to women through ‘settlement houses’ and visiting nurses, but the most effective pedagogy of hygiene targeted children in schools. Hygiene instruction prodded children to swat flies, refrain from spitting, brush their teeth and hair, clean their clothing, wash all of their body and not just the parts that showed, eat balanced meals, and abstain from alcohol, tobacco, and sex. Humiliation of children who did not meet the teacher's standards was frequently used to reinforce these lessons, and students were expected to carry the lessons home. African- Americans and immigrants readily embraced hygienic living as a means of uplift. Booker T. Washington, prominent leader of the African- American community and founder of the Tuskegee Institute, emphasized the ‘gospel of the toothbrush’. Ironically, African-Americans, many of whom worked as janitors, maids, and laundresses, were viewed as indelibly dirty and diseased regardless of their adherence to the hygienic standards of the white middle classes.

Racial hygiene

The racism inherent in this evaluation of blacks and immigrants was at the root of the international eugenics movement, also known as the racial hygiene movement. Proponents of eugenics in the US, Great Britain, Australia, France, Germany, and Scandinavia maintained that social health and progress would arise from increased childbearing among presumably superior people and limitation of reproduction for genetically inferior people. The US led the way in passing legislation which allowed forced sterilization of ‘undesirables’ in custodial care, such as the mentally ill, criminals, and racial minorities. By the 1930s, 2000-4000 operations per year were performed in 23 states, with nearly half of all sterilizations occurring in California.

In 1933 Germany followed the American lead with the passage of two sterilization laws patterned primarily on California's model. The chief difference was that the law in Germany standardized procedures for determining eligibility for sterilization and applied these rules to the entire nation, an ‘advantage’ much admired by many American genetic scientists and eugenicists. The Nazi use of showers as a façade for the gassing of millions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and communists ironically underscores this perversion of hygienic practices.

Advertising cleanliness

The 1920s saw the introduction of a new corporate understanding of hygiene that wedded the educational approach of the social reformers to the methods of mass communication. Good hygiene became associated with good business. Metropolitan Insurance of New York and the Henry Street Visiting Nurses Association reached an agreement whereby the nurses taught Metropolitan clients to live hygienically. The Cleanliness Institute, founded by the Association of American Soap and Glycerine Producers, created lessons for teachers on personal hygiene. They also hired a popular children's author to create a series of five books with churlish characters called goops, including the unhygienic characters of Hatesope and Rodirtygus who refused to bathe. The lesson of each of the tales was that no good child would behave like a goop. Since corporate promoters of hygiene had two aims, to draw new users into the market for their products and to encourage greater consumption of their products by current users, they added new diseases, such as halitosis (bad breath) and body odour, to the list that good hygiene supposedly prevented. The introduction of these ‘disease states’ indicated a shift in the understanding of hygiene, which now emphasized a well-groomed personal image and social acceptability as important outcomes of what was once extolled as the harbinger of health. In the US this meant that hygiene now included removal of ‘unsightly hair’ from women's underarms (beginning in the nineteen-teens) and legs (after the 1940s).

Sexual hygiene

Attitudes on hygienic sexual practice paralleled the evolution of general understanding of hygiene. When healthful living and moral character were equated, good sexual hygiene meant abstaining from all sexual activities. William Andross Alcott, a prominent health reformer in the nineteenth century, warned that sexual activity, including frequent heterosexual intercourse and ‘self abuse’ or masturbation, led to poor mental and physical health, because it exhausted the body's vital energies. When proper hygiene was seen as a bulwark of social order and civilization, the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis and the American Social Hygiene Association promoted control of erotic impulses through publication of ‘scientific’ information on sex, and sex education in schools, which emphasized negative consequences of intercourse and was intended to prevent sexual experimentation among teenagers. In addition to supporting forced sterilization of ‘undesirable elements’, the early-twentieth-century sexual hygiene movement also aimed at eliminating prostitution and inculcating a single sexual standard for both males and females. The corporate approach to hygiene created an interesting paradox concerning sex. Consumers, particularly girls, were urged to engage in hygienic practices that would make them sexually desirable, while health educators warned that nice boys and girls did not engage in sexual activities outside of marriage. None the less, heterosexual relations within the bonds of marriage were seen as natural and healthy. In the youth rebellion of the 1960s hygienic teachings about grooming and abstinence became associated with the corrupt ways of bourgeois society. Ironically, the counterculture embraced both dirt and unrestrained sexual relations as a means of breaking from this corruption and creating a ‘purer’, more ‘natural’, and ‘healthier’ way of life.

Contemporary understanding of hygiene reflects the tensions inherent in its history. Hygiene has partially become a byword for the quaint sexual mores promoted in high school classrooms of the 1950s. Yet in a era of teenage pregnancy and epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, schools and public health agencies are returning to the message that abstinence and sexual self-control are essential to continued good health. We also face the paradox that advertising and mass communication, which successfully used sex and social acceptability to sell hygienic practices to our grandparents and great grandparents, are now promoting images of health and beauty linked to epidemic levels of eating disorders.

— Jacqueline S. Wilkie

Bibliography

Hoy, S. (1995). Chasing dirt: the American pursuit of cleanliness. Oxford University Press, New York.
Kühl, S. (1994) The Nazi connection: eugenics, American racism and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press, New York

Medical hygiene

Medical hygiene pertains to the hygiene practices related to the administration of medicine and medical care that prevents or minimizes disease and the spreading of disease.

Medical hygiene practices include:

Isolation or quarantine of infectious persons or materials to prevent spread of infection.
Sterilization of instruments used in surgical procedures.
Use of protective clothing and barriers, such as masks, gowns, caps, eyewear and gloves.
Proper bandaging and dressing of injuries.
Safe disposal of medical waste.
Disinfection of reusables (i.e. linen, pads, uniforms)

Most of these practices were developed in the 19th century and were well established by the mid-20th century. Some procedures (such as disposal of medical waste) were tightened up as a result of late-20th century disease outbreaks, notably AIDS and Ebola.

Personal hygiene

Personal hygiene pertains to hygiene practices performed by an individual to care for one’s bodily health and well being through cleanliness. Motivations for personal hygiene practice include reduction of personal illness, healing from personal illness, optimal health and sense of well being, social acceptance and prevention of spread of illness to others.

Personal hygiene practices include: seeing a doctor, seeing a dentist, regular washing (bathing or showering) of the body, regular hand washing, brushing and flossing of the teeth, basic manicure and pedicure, feminine hygiene and healthy eating. Personal grooming extends personal hygiene as it pertains to the maintenance of a good personal and public appearance which need not necessarily be hygienic.

Personal hygiene is achieved by using personal hygiene products including: soap, hair shampoo, hair conditioner, toothbrushes, tooth paste, cotton swabs, deodorant, chapstick, cream, lotion, facial tissue, hair clippers, nail clippers, mouthwash, nail files, skin cleansers, razors, shaving cream, skin cream and toilet paper. Other personal hygiene and grooming products can be used to improve health and well being.

Excessive personal hygiene

The benefits of personal hygiene are offset by the risks of excessive personal hygiene which is hypothesized to cause allergic disease and bodily irritation.

Excessive hygiene and A (h1n1)

Excessive hygiene of external ear canals

Excessive hygiene of skin

Culinary hygiene

Main article: Food safety

Culinary hygiene pertains to the practices related to food management and cooking to prevent food contamination, prevent food poisoning and minimize the transmission of disease to other foods, humans or animals. Culinary hygiene practices specify safe ways to handle, store, prepare, serve and eat food.

Culinary practices include:

Cleaning and sterilization of food-preparation areas and equipment (for example using designated cutting boards for preparing raw meats and vegetables). Cleaning may involve use of chlorine bleach, ethanol, ultraviolet light, etc. for sterilization.
Careful avoidance of meats contaminated by trichina worms, salmonella, and other pathogens; or thorough cooking of questionable meats.
Extreme care in preparing raw foods, such as sushi and sashimi.
Institutional dish sanitizing by washing with soap and clean water.
Washing of hands thoroughly before touching any food.
Washing of hands after touching uncooked food when preparing meals.
Not using the same utensils to prepare different foods.
Not sharing cutlery when eating.
Not licking fingers or hands while or after eating.
Not reusing serving utensils that have been licked.
Proper storage of food so as to prevent contamination by vermin.
Refrigeration of foods (and avoidance of specific foods in environments where refrigeration is or was not feasible).
Labeling food to indicate when it was produced (or, as food manufacturers prefer, to indicate its "best before" date).
Proper disposal of uneaten food and packaging.

Personal service hygiene

Personal service hygiene pertains to the practices related to the care and use of instruments used in the administration of personal care services to people:

Personal hygiene practices include:

Sterilization of instruments used by service providers including hairdressers, aestheticins, and other service providers .
Sterilization by autoclave of instruments used in body piercing and tattoo marking
Cleaning hands before providing services using

this is how to keep clean

History of hygienic practices

Elaborate codes of hygiene can be found in several Hindu texts such as the Manusmriti and the Vishnu Purana.^[2] Bathing is one of the five Nitya karmas (daily duties) in Sikhism, not performing which leads to sin according to some scriptures. These codes were based on the notion of ritual purity and were not informed by an understanding of the causes of diseases and their means of transmission. However, some of the ritual-purity codes did improve hygiene, from an epidemiological point of view, more or less by accident.

Regular bathing was a hallmark of Roman civilization.^[3] Elaborate baths were constructed in urban areas to serve the public, who typically demanded the infrastructure to maintain personal cleanliness. The complexes usually consisted of large, swimming pool-like baths, smaller cold and hot pools, saunas, and spa-like facilities where individuals could be depilated, oiled, and massaged. Water was constantly changed by an aqueduct-fed flow. Bathing outside of urban centers involved smaller, less elaborate bathing facilities, or simply the use of clean bodies of water. Roman cities also had large sewers, such as Rome's Cloaca Maxima, into which public and private latrines drained. Romans didn't have demand-flush toilets but did have some toilets with a continuous flow of water under them. (Similar toilets are seen in Acre Prison in the film Exodus.)

Until the late 19th Century, only the elite in Western cities typically possessed indoor facilities for relieving bodily functions. The poorer majority used communal facilities built above cesspools in backyards and courtyards. This changed after Dr. John Snow discovered that cholera was transmitted by the fecal contamination of water. Though it took decades for his findings to gain wide acceptance, governments and sanitary reformers were eventually convinced of the health benefits of using sewers to keep human waste from contaminating water. This encouraged the widespread adoption of both the flush toilet and the moral imperative that bathrooms should be indoors and as private as possible.^[4]

Hygiene in the Islamic world

Main article: Islamic hygienical jurisprudence

Further information: Islamic cleanliness, Wudu, Ghusl, Islamic dietary laws, and Islamic toilet etiquette

Since the 7th century, Islam has always placed a strong emphasis on hygiene. Other than the need to be ritually clean in time for the daily prayer (Arabic: Salat) through Wudu and Ghusl, there are a large number of other hygiene-related rules governing the lives of Muslims. Other issues include the Islamic dietary laws. In general, the Qur'an advises Muslims to uphold high standards of physical hygiene and to be ritually clean whenever possible.

Hygiene in Europe

Contrary to popular belief^[5] and although the Early Christian leaders condemned bathing as unspiritual,^[6] bathing and sanitation were not lost in Europe with the collapse of the Roman Empire.^[7]^[8] As a matter of fact, soapmaking first became an established trade during the so-called "Dark Ages." The Romans used scented oils (mostly from Egypt), among other alternatives.

Bathing in fact did not fall out of fashion in Europe until shortly after the Renaissance, replaced by the heavy use of sweat-bathing and perfume, as it was thought in Europe that water could carry disease into the body through the skin. (Water, in fact, does carry disease, but more often if it is drunk than if one bathes in it; and water only carries disease if it is contaminated by pathogens.) Medieval church authorities believed that public bathing created an environment open to immorality and disease. Roman Catholic Church officials even banned public bathing in an unsuccessful effort to halt syphilis epidemics from sweeping Europe.^[9] Modern sanitation as we know it was not widely adopted until the 19th and 20th centuries. According to medieval historian Lynn Thorndike, people in Medieval Europe probably bathed more than people did in the 19th century.^[10]

Academic resources

International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, ISSN: 1438-4639, Elsevier

References

^ Strachan DP. Family size, infection and atopy: the first decade of the "hygiene hypothesis". Thorax 55 Suppl 1:S2-10.: S2-10, 2000.
^ Sulabh International Museum of Toilets
^ Roman bath houses
^ Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by its Grossest National Product, ISBN 1-932-59521-X
^ The Bad Old Days — Weddings & Hygiene
^ Ablutions or Bathing, Historical Perspectives + (Latin: abluere, to wash away)
^ The Great Famine (1315-1317) and the Black Death (1346-1351)
^ Middle Ages Hygiene
^ Paige, John C; Laura Woulliere Harrison (1987). Out of the Vapors: A Social and Architectural History of Bathhouse Row, Hot Springs National Park. U.S. Department of the Interior. http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/hosp/bathhouse_row.pdf.
^ Tales of the Middle Ages - Daily Life

External links

Look up hygiene in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics on hand washing
Centers for Disease Control on hand hygiene in healthcare settings
U.S. State Department information on hygiene customs in the United States.
Home Economics Archive: Tradition, Research, History (HEARTH)
An e-book collection of over 1,000 books on home economics spanning 1850 to 1950, created by Cornell University's Mann Library. Includes several hundred works on hygiene in this period, itemized in a specific bibliography.

Public Health

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Preventive
medicine

Health promotion • Family planning • Healthy diet/Nutrition • Pharmacovigilance • Smoking cessation •

Vaccination • Infection control • Safe sex • Hygiene (Hand washing • Food safety • dental) • Sanitation (Sanitary sewer) • Waterborne diseases • Water management • Community-led total sanitation) • Vector control • Injury prevention • Patient safety (organization) •

Occupational safety and health (Industrial hygiene • Ergonomics)

Population
health

Biostatistics • Epidemiology • Health Impact Assessment •

Public health informatics • Public Health Software (Epi Info, OpenEpi)

Social medicine • Social determinants of health (Health disparities • Healthcare inequality • Health and Social Class • Race and health)

Organizations, Education and History

Agencies and organizations	World health organization • European (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control • Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety) • Indian health ministry • US (US Public Health Service (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) • Public Health - Center for Public Health Practice • Center for Minority Health • Council on Education for Public Health • Public Health - Seattle & King County) • World Toilet Organization • Globalization and Health

Education	Health education • Bachelor of Science in Public Health • Master of Public Health • Doctor of Public Health • European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training (EPIET) • Professional Further Education in Clinical Pharmacy and Public Health

History	Samuel Crumbine • Sara Josephine Baker • Social hygiene movement • "Typhoid Mary" • Carl Rogers Darnall • Germ theory of disease • John Snow • Joseph Lister • Margaret Sanger

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Misspellings: hygiene

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Common misspelling(s) of hygiene

hygeine

Translations: Hygiene

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - hygiejne

Nederlands (Dutch)
hygiëne

Français (French)
n. - hygiène

Deutsch (German)
n. - Hygiene

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (ιατρ.) υγιεινολογία, υγιεινή

Italiano (Italian)
igiene

Português (Portuguese)
n. - higiene (f)

Русский (Russian)
гигиена

Español (Spanish)
n. - higiene

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - hygien, hälsovård

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
卫生保健, 保健法, 卫生学

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 衛生保健, 保健法, 衛生學

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 위생, 위생학

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 衛生, 衛生学

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) علم الصحه بنائها وحفظها, الاحوال والعادات والاساليب كالنظافه المفضيه إلى الصحه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮גהות, היגיינה‬

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