Peter Ward and why we bathe so much

November 05th, 2019

In the Western world, we bathe and change clothes often. At least, far more often than our ancestors did according to UBC professor emeritus of history, Peter Ward in The Clean Body: A Modern History (McGill-Queen’s $37.95). He has extensively researched personal hygiene and found that in the age of France’s King Louis XIV, bathing was rare and hygiene mainly a matter of wearing clean underclothes. By the late 1900s, the norm was to bathe daily and freshly laundered clothing the general practice. How did this transformation take place? Ward is the author of several books on the social history of Canada and the history of population health. 978-0-7735-5938-7

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