During Louis XIV’s astounding 72 years as king of France, he bathed an equally astounding number of times: twice. London diarist Samuel Pepys was just as water-averse, and took a bath in 1664 only because his wife refused to sleep with him until he did. Canadian academic Peter Ward explores the three-centuries-plus journey from superficial royal wash-ups to our germ-obsessed, squeaky-clean world in The Clean Body: A Modern History, an engrossing book that reveals our ancestors’ dirty secrets and explores how and why we cleaned up our act.
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