Creeping In: How The Seeds of Germaphobia Were Sowed
Our national obsession with germs and bacteria may have started as far back as the Civil War but seems to have taken root in the early public health campaigns of New York City. With the advent of clean drinking water and new sewer systems, came a new level of awareness regarding the importance of cleanliness and good hygiene as well as the hidden health threats looming in filthy, unsanitary conditions.
Many of our beliefs around germs and disease may have been fueled by the work of Pierre Bechamp, and later, Louis Pasteur. Pasteur is well known as the scientist who brought us “Germ Theory” and led us to believe that germs from the outside world invade our bodies and “cause” disease, which is why we have to kill them before they kill us. In an ironic twist, it turns out that Pasteur had plagiarized some of the work of Bechamp, who demonstrated that it’s the “terrain” (meaning the environment inside your body) that matters more than the germs themselves. Pasteur distorted the work of Bechamp and made a name for him self by asserting that it was the other way around. As he lay on his deathbed, he admitted that Bechamp was right when he uttered “The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.”
The proliferation of Pasteur’s “germ theory” combined with the success of early public health campaigns eventually gave rise to a new generation of household cleaners, personal care products, and drugs designed to kill bacteria and germs. Juliann Sivulka’s extensive research, presented in Stronger than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising Personal Hygiene in America, suggests some of the “anti-microbial” advertising began as early as 1875 and continued well throughout the twentieth century.
Without any guidance on how to lead healthier lives and strengthen our immune systems to better handle the biological challenges we might encounter, we’ve increasingly come to rely on anti-bacterial (and potentially toxic) products like bleach, ammonia, isopropyl alcohol, and more recently, hand sanitizers and anti-bacterial soaps, to assuage our fears. Many of these products now contain worrisome ingredients like Triclosan, a derivative of Agent Orange, whose over-use is creating new resistant strains of bacteria or “Super Bugs.” Ironically, these Super Bugs pose an even greater threat to our future ability to resist infection and disease, which begs the question is our fear of germs really helping us or could it be inadvertently hurting us? Knowing the genesis of our “germaphobia,” it’s not hard to see how the work of a misguided scientist coincided with larger commercial interests to bring us to this point.
