Six days from now, Indians, at least the ones who have remained untouched by Covid thus far, should put a bar of soap and a mug of water on the altar and start, as is their wont, beating pots and pans. For they owe their lives to handwashing, a ritual that is celebrated around the world as ‘Global Handwashing Day’ that falls on October 15.
Even soap and water can be luxuries. As the pandemic began to snuff out lives, researchers found that at least 50 million Indians did not have access to either water or soap. In a separate study, the NSSO revealed that only 35.8 per cent of Indians washed their hands with detergent. The NSSO report must have been talking about people like us — citizens lucky enough to hoard soap and water and knowledgeable about their utility.
But how knowledgeable are we really about the history of hygiene? Do we, for instance, know that the energetic rubbing of lathery hands is a relatively new medical and cultural phenomenon, going back to a little under 200 years? There wouldn’t have been any handwashing or, for that matter, a Global Handwashing Day had it not been for the publication of The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, which compiled the seminal findings of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, who, while working in a hospital in Vienna, noticed that the risk of contracting ‘childbed fever’ in obstetrical clinics could be reduced significantly if doctors — they were then in the habit of delivering babies after cutting open cadavers — began washing their hands with chlorinated lime solution.
Semmelweis’s medical colleagues, much like the 65 per cent of Indians with poor understanding of hygiene, would have none of it. Miryam Wahrman — she penned The Handbook: Surviving in a Germ-Filled World — says that Semmelweis was hounded out of his job. He turned into a wreck, dying in a psychiatric hospital at the age of 47.
Semmelweis’s redemption — redemption can come in strange ways — in popular culture could be attributed to a literary and cinematic classic. Years ago, a piece in The Wall Street Journal mentioned an innovative campaign to raise levels of public hygiene in America that had turned to literary classics, only to tweak the text to suit its noble purpose. Thus, the opening paragraph of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was made to read like this: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. Nor did they realize when they grew frightfully ill that it was the touch of her magnolia-white skin that made them so sick. For, disregarding all ladylike behavior, Scarlett had frivolously not washed her hands after attending to her business in the lady’s parlor. Her delicate hands, being so unguarded, touched those of the twins, causing the unfortunate spread of an atrocious bacterial disease.”
The literary heresy raised howls of protest in a country where, Wahrman found, only 69 per cent of women and 43 per cent of men washed their hands after urinating. Semmelweis wouldn’t have been surprised by the fuss. But he would have been astonished to learn that years after his passing human ignorance remains as stubborn as germs.
