Hygiene - The Ancient World, C. 500 B.c.e. –200 C.e.
personal current health
Hygiene is defined in current English dictionaries as "the science of health." This definition, though formally correct, hides a long history of change in the word's use, from its holistic classical meaning of "individual regimens to preserve health" to its nineteenth-century connotations of "social medicine" (including lethal eugenics programs), to its current limited construal as "personal cleanliness" or "germ removal." For more than 2,500 years of use in many different lands, concepts of hygiene have been integral to personal identity, shaping sense of self through boundary maintenance and spirituality.
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Hygienic instruction was tailored to each individual's constitution, itself the result of humoral activity, and to their environmental and personal circumstances, such as age, sex, status, and relations with others. Proper hygiene included regulations concerning sexual activity, sleeping and waking, bathing, exercise (a central activity for freeborn Greeks), and above all, diet. Dietary reg…
These Islamic physicians followed Galen's successors in considering the six "nonnaturals" (that is, factors external to the body) as the canonical categories that composed hygiene: air (or "environment"), food and drink, sleeping and waking, movement and rest, retention and evacuation (including ejaculation), and mental-emotions ("passions of the soul�…
The concept of hygiene underwent immense changes during and after the eighteenth century. As the use of dissection and the microscope became increasingly common for the new medical sciences of anatomy, physiology, and pathology, Galenic theories were quickly discarded. Many physicians began to treat traditional hygiene as at best a branch of education rather than an area of medicine, at worst a fo…
In the hygienic era, national populations were conceptualized as biological entities, that is, as races. Encompassing much more than skin color, the notion of race reflected social characteristics (such as courage or honesty) as well as physical ones (such as longevity and intelligence) that were considered to be hereditary. Races were thought about in Darwinian terms as organisms that could evolv…
Galen. A Translation of Galen's Hygiene (De sanitate tuenda). Translated by Robert Montraville Greene. Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1951. Richardson, Benjamin Ward. Hygeia: A City of Health. London: Macmillan, 1876. Armstrong, David. "Public Health Spaces and the Fabrication of Identity." Sociology 27 (1993): 393–403. Bashford, Alison. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History…
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