Will Future Generations Think We're Gross?
Do we have limiting mindset about hygiene?
I’m reading Plumb’s 18th Century England about life under Sir Robert Walpole. It’s a bit weird reading it since the book was written in 1955, so it’s like a historical artefact writing about history.
One thing that has hits me was just how unsanitary Plumb describes the people of the early 1700s, both in towns and rural areas. If you had a time machine, then ‘the first thing that hits you is the stench’. People sleeping with animals, taking shits on the street, leaving dead bodies in the alley, and not brushing their teeth (can you imagine?!). Yes, disease was rife, and that is to be expected, but I’m surprised how much likely tolerance there was the whole place just smelling bad.
Again, even more shocking - check out this aggregated diagram of how many deaths there were in the 1700s as a function of age. I left my Claude code running to collect some data on death rates from the little records there are (mostly European parish records) on child mortality and made a plot. I got these mostly from the literature. Simply put, you had a coin toss’s chance of living after five years old at the time. But the real number is likely to be a lot higher due to reporting bias, and the dispersion in the data is also likely a function of that.
Fair to say, there is some romanticisation about lifestyle in the 18th Century, being it the period of enlightenment. Just spend a day at the east wing of the British museum! And the historical accounts of hygiene practices differ with the sweet and clean, pastel coloured romances you read about in the fiction of the time, like Mr Willoughby and his multiple baths in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
Which makes me think, were people just normalised to their level of hygiene back then? Probably. And in that case, if hygiene standards are relative, then it’s likely that future generations will think we’re gross.
If I could bet on one thing that future generations will say ‘wow, I can’t believe they did that back then’, then it would be the fact that we share common air indoors with people who have the flu without any defence. Second, it would be overcrowding on public transport and public spaces in general.
But it’s hard to imagine how this would change. Would people of the future view us not wearing a mask in the same way as we might view sleeping on hay with our chickens? In the future, maybe we have some technology that cleans the air without hurting us - potentially far UVC. Maybe we have some regulation or system to control how many people there are in a given space at one time based on elaborate CFD and air modelling. Or maybe it just looks like a better culture around ventilation. It’s hard to say. But I don’t think we should have a limiting mindset about how much better it could be!