Abstract
The concept of a healthy skin penetrated the lives of many people in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Popular writings on skin and soap advertisements are significant for pointing to the notions of the skin as a symbolic surface: a visual moral ideal. Popular health publications reveal how much contemporary understanding of skin defined and connected ideas of cleanliness and the visual ideals of the healthy body in Victorian Britain. Characterised as a ‘sanitary commissioner’ of the body, skin represented the organ of drainage for body and society. The importance of keeping the skin clean and purging it of waste materials such as sweat and dirt resonated in a Britain that embraced city sanitation developments, female beauty practices, racial identities and moral reform. By focusing on the popular work by British surgeon and dermatologist Erasmus Wilson (1809–84), this article offers a history of skin through the lens of the sanitary movement and developments in the struggle for control over healthy skin still in place today.
In a time of continuous fear of death and disease, Alfred Power’s 1871 sanitary rhyme revealed a profound idea about the moral and reforming value of the skin. After thorough microscopical studies and the determination of the sweat ducts, in the early nineteenth-century skin has been redefined as an organ with complex physiological functioning. By the 1840s, physicians such as the London dermatologist Erasmus Wilson (1809–84) had started using this knowledge as a tool for sanitary reform. In the popular work Healthy Skin (1845), Wilson preached the message of skin cleanliness for the general public.2 He believed that a moral uplifting of society could be achieved through cleansing and controlling the vital and all-influencing skin.3 Publications such as Healthy Skin and other popular handbooks on health, beauty and household cleanliness connected a renewed appraisal for the skin system to the physical and moral cleanliness of workers, women and children. Moreover, Wilson’s messages ended up in one of the strongest visual campaigns for skin cleanliness in the late nineteenth century: the mass advertising campaign for Pears’ soap.
These popular writings on skin are significant for pointing to the role of the skin as a symbolic surface. Skin represented the organ of drainage for body and society. To keep the skin clean and purge it of waste materials such as sweat and dirt resonated in a Victorian Britain awash with improvements in city sanitation, novel female beauty practices, new views of racial identity and moral reform. Characterising skin as a ‘sanitary commissioner’4 of the body, popular health publications revealed just how much the contemporary understanding of skin defined and connected concepts of cleanliness and the visual ideals of the healthy body in Victorian Britain.
This focus on skin and public health improves our understanding of the history of body care and bodily control in the sanitary context. So far medical historians have discussed meanings and experiences of skin in the context of particular periods and medical practices.5 The excellent collection A Medical History of Skin contains recent contributions on skin diseases, stigma associated with them, and their visual representation.6 Cultural historians, social anthropologists, and literary scholars have focused on the body and skin as a cultural subject shaped by history.7 In her study Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (2002), literary historian Claudia Benthien shows how conceptualisations of coloured skin, skin as a boundary and skin as a mirror of the soul are moulded in history and culture. Although Benthien, and in a similar way Steven Connor in his inspiring The Book of Skin, demonstrate the cultural metaphor of skin in history, they do not fully analyse the practical understandings of skin in popular physiology or visual sources. How were women and men in Victorian Britain confronted with the value of skin hygiene in everyday life? How did the skin become morally charged in popular health? Erasmus Wilson’s work on skin and other handbooks on cleanliness together with visual motifs in soap advertisements transformed the skin from a receptive layer into a tool of control for health, beauty and civilisation.
Sanitary conceptions of skin, of which Erasmus Wilson’s ideas are a distinctive example, gained meaning when medical definition and popular (visual) imagination of the body intersected. A close study of popular writings on skin reveals fundamental analogies between the skin as the drainage system for the body and needs for proper city and domestic sewage and bathing facilities. Similarly, an analysis of common soap advertisements exposes the layered visual exposition of the skin as an organ of body and society, disclosing references to control over race, gender and personal beauty. For Victorian women and sanitarians alike, skin became the locus of control over unwanted ‘evacuations’ on all levels.
This article offers a history of skin through the lens of the sanitary movement by focusing on the popular work of Erasmus Wilson. His story of skin encompasses a decisive episode in the historiography of the medical history of the body, when developments in the struggle for control over healthy skin still in place today first began. Even in such broad genres of scholarship as the history of public health and cleanliness,8 the skin has hardly been discussed as a separate topic. Virginia Smith in her encompassing study on the history of personal hygiene convincingly shows how care of the skin played an important part in vitalist physiology and calls for cleanliness from 1800 onwards.9 Yet the importance of skin cleanliness and the skin’s ability to evacuate waste materials really gained currency after the anatomical definition of the sweat ducts and the popularisation of the anatomy of skin as a whole within the drainage-focused sanitary movement. The emergence of attention to skin diseases and the microscopical journey into the depths of skin structures in the first half of the century articulated the skin as an organ that mattered and one that symbolised the promise of control over disease. Moreover, this paper argues that Wilson’s popular writings on skin and bodily health, picked up by the producers of Pears’ soap, indicated how popular knowledge of the skin was imprinted in symbolic and morally loaded pictures.
Resource: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Resource: http://www.nutritionforest.com/
The concept of a healthy skin penetrated the lives of many people in late-nineteenth-century Britain. Popular writings on skin and soap advertisements are significant for pointing to the notions of the skin as a symbolic surface: a visual moral ideal. Popular health publications reveal how much contemporary understanding of skin defined and connected ideas of cleanliness and the visual ideals of the healthy body in Victorian Britain. Characterised as a ‘sanitary commissioner’ of the body, skin represented the organ of drainage for body and society. The importance of keeping the skin clean and purging it of waste materials such as sweat and dirt resonated in a Britain that embraced city sanitation developments, female beauty practices, racial identities and moral reform. By focusing on the popular work by British surgeon and dermatologist Erasmus Wilson (1809–84), this article offers a history of skin through the lens of the sanitary movement and developments in the struggle for control over healthy skin still in place today.
In a time of continuous fear of death and disease, Alfred Power’s 1871 sanitary rhyme revealed a profound idea about the moral and reforming value of the skin. After thorough microscopical studies and the determination of the sweat ducts, in the early nineteenth-century skin has been redefined as an organ with complex physiological functioning. By the 1840s, physicians such as the London dermatologist Erasmus Wilson (1809–84) had started using this knowledge as a tool for sanitary reform. In the popular work Healthy Skin (1845), Wilson preached the message of skin cleanliness for the general public.2 He believed that a moral uplifting of society could be achieved through cleansing and controlling the vital and all-influencing skin.3 Publications such as Healthy Skin and other popular handbooks on health, beauty and household cleanliness connected a renewed appraisal for the skin system to the physical and moral cleanliness of workers, women and children. Moreover, Wilson’s messages ended up in one of the strongest visual campaigns for skin cleanliness in the late nineteenth century: the mass advertising campaign for Pears’ soap.
These popular writings on skin are significant for pointing to the role of the skin as a symbolic surface. Skin represented the organ of drainage for body and society. To keep the skin clean and purge it of waste materials such as sweat and dirt resonated in a Victorian Britain awash with improvements in city sanitation, novel female beauty practices, new views of racial identity and moral reform. Characterising skin as a ‘sanitary commissioner’4 of the body, popular health publications revealed just how much the contemporary understanding of skin defined and connected concepts of cleanliness and the visual ideals of the healthy body in Victorian Britain.
This focus on skin and public health improves our understanding of the history of body care and bodily control in the sanitary context. So far medical historians have discussed meanings and experiences of skin in the context of particular periods and medical practices.5 The excellent collection A Medical History of Skin contains recent contributions on skin diseases, stigma associated with them, and their visual representation.6 Cultural historians, social anthropologists, and literary scholars have focused on the body and skin as a cultural subject shaped by history.7 In her study Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World (2002), literary historian Claudia Benthien shows how conceptualisations of coloured skin, skin as a boundary and skin as a mirror of the soul are moulded in history and culture. Although Benthien, and in a similar way Steven Connor in his inspiring The Book of Skin, demonstrate the cultural metaphor of skin in history, they do not fully analyse the practical understandings of skin in popular physiology or visual sources. How were women and men in Victorian Britain confronted with the value of skin hygiene in everyday life? How did the skin become morally charged in popular health? Erasmus Wilson’s work on skin and other handbooks on cleanliness together with visual motifs in soap advertisements transformed the skin from a receptive layer into a tool of control for health, beauty and civilisation.
Sanitary conceptions of skin, of which Erasmus Wilson’s ideas are a distinctive example, gained meaning when medical definition and popular (visual) imagination of the body intersected. A close study of popular writings on skin reveals fundamental analogies between the skin as the drainage system for the body and needs for proper city and domestic sewage and bathing facilities. Similarly, an analysis of common soap advertisements exposes the layered visual exposition of the skin as an organ of body and society, disclosing references to control over race, gender and personal beauty. For Victorian women and sanitarians alike, skin became the locus of control over unwanted ‘evacuations’ on all levels.
This article offers a history of skin through the lens of the sanitary movement by focusing on the popular work of Erasmus Wilson. His story of skin encompasses a decisive episode in the historiography of the medical history of the body, when developments in the struggle for control over healthy skin still in place today first began. Even in such broad genres of scholarship as the history of public health and cleanliness,8 the skin has hardly been discussed as a separate topic. Virginia Smith in her encompassing study on the history of personal hygiene convincingly shows how care of the skin played an important part in vitalist physiology and calls for cleanliness from 1800 onwards.9 Yet the importance of skin cleanliness and the skin’s ability to evacuate waste materials really gained currency after the anatomical definition of the sweat ducts and the popularisation of the anatomy of skin as a whole within the drainage-focused sanitary movement. The emergence of attention to skin diseases and the microscopical journey into the depths of skin structures in the first half of the century articulated the skin as an organ that mattered and one that symbolised the promise of control over disease. Moreover, this paper argues that Wilson’s popular writings on skin and bodily health, picked up by the producers of Pears’ soap, indicated how popular knowledge of the skin was imprinted in symbolic and morally loaded pictures.
Resource: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
Resource: http://www.nutritionforest.com/
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