Product Description: For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a public two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, a scraping of the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the seventeenth-century aristocratic Frenchman, it meant changing his shirt once a day, using perfume to obliterate both his own aroma and everyone else’s, but never immersing himself in – horrors! – water...read more

Recounts the various ways that people have tried to cope with disposing of human waste and keeping themselves clean throughout history, and describes how people in Third World countries handle the problem today.

Studies the social, technological, historical, and cultural conquest of water discussing the role water plays in public and private life