Listen: A New Definition of ‘Clean’
On this episode of the podcast Social Distance, the Atlantic staff writer James Hamblin talks about his new book, Clean: The New Science of Skin.
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What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.
Katherine Wells: What does it mean to be clean?
James Hamblin: “Clean” started as a religious concept with a strong moral valence. It didn’t become associated with health and hygiene in any real sense until we learned about germ theory about 150 years ago. Since then, it’s been a slow growth of a lot of habits and practices that we sort of associate vaguely with health and hygiene and preventing infectious disease, but in many common uses today, it’s actually just a sort of a judgmental term that we use to say who is acceptable and who is not.
What was the
