From the ancient Greeks worshipping their goddess Hygeia with water and prayer, through medieval peasants enjoying the delights of mixed public bathing, to 19th-century health crusaders eager to make the urban poor more sanitary and less smelly, people have always been concerned with cleanliness and purity. As Smith reveals in her survey of human body-care through the ages, a “dense mass of human history” clusters around the belief that dirt is “bad” and the removal of it is “good”. Water has always been the easiest, most natural means of shifting the grime, but men and women have never been averse to the idea of giving nature a helping hand. Pampering the body beautiful is not a pastime restricted to the spas and salons of today. Cosmetics enter the historical record at much the same time as cities and royal courts do, and, in ancient Egypt as in modern America, if you were wealthy and powerful you would also be well-groomed. The complementary notion, that cleanliness is next to godliness, may have occasionally taken a battering from holy hermits who believed that God had no great interest in their personal hygiene, but it has been around since the earliest days of Christianity. Smith’s book, filled with offbeat erudition, is a fascinating journey through centuries in which the two ideas (that physical cleansing of the body is healthy and pleasure-giving and that there is a link between such cleansing and moral virtue) have intertwined and interacted Clean by Virginia Smith

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