ABSTRACT

While the prevention of disease and the maintenance of health are ancient and widely shared objectives, the concept of hygiene, as generally used today, is of relatively recent provenance.1 The word hygiena, crafted from the feminine form of the Greek word for “healthy” or “wholesome” (ὑγιεινός), first entered the English language only at the turn of the sixteenth century. In keeping with its etymology, hygiena designated instructions on how to “continuallye preserve our presente health.”2 Hygiene, in its now-familiar spelling, took hold only after 1840, and was not widely used until the 1880s. The increasing currency of the word over the course of the nineteenth century can be gauged by the proliferation of modifiers associated with it, including naval hygiene (1879), racial hygiene (1889), and sex hygiene (1899).3