You Could Eat off the Floor

Back in the 1970’s, I brought a friend home to visit with my parents. Taking advantage of a moment alone, he turned to whisper in amazement, “You could eat off the floor!” I looked around. As usual, there was no speck of dust on the floor, no dried water droplet on the faucet, no specks of food on the stove or the floor. Even so, I had taken on my parents’ view of cleanliness. I balked. “But you can’t eat off the floor! We walked on it!”

My mother was brought up by the generation of Scandinavian homemakers who believed that cleanliness was next to godliness, and that laborsaving devices offered the opportunity to create unprecedented virtue. Influenced by the high rate of maternal and child mortality of her childhood, and informed by militarism, modernism and the temperance and hygiene movements, she saw germs as the enemy and cleaned to the point of sterility.

I was part of a generation brought up to understand that hygiene could prevent many deaths, and created a newer, healthier reality. Those of us who were paying attention learned from hard experience that hygiene was not the same thing as sterility. Some doctors recognized that the latter could cause new ailments known as diseases of cleanliness, which prevented early infections at the cost of restricting immune system development. Some of these diseases, like mumps orchitis and paralytic polio, can be averted by immunization.

To help us understand this, our microbiology professor asked us medical students a trick question: “What do you do when you drop your sandwich on the floor?” His answer was that you would pick it up and eat it because we catch infections from people, not dirt. Dirt can be clean.