"don't spit!!"

In these days of swine flu and the ubiquitous Purell hand sanitizer pumps (which are stationed like sentinels at the teller stations of my bank), Nancy Tomes’s Gospel of Germs is apropos. Social histories are important reminders that contemporary American culture was not formed in a vacuum. Indeed, our collective habits regarding health and disease prevention have evolved over a long period of time with the help of various scientific discoveries and, at times, paranoid tendencies to see every insect, handrail, and dollar bill as mortal enemies. While turning the pages of the book, I couldn’t help thinking how the germ revelations of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century have informed our popular conceptions (mainly propagated through advertising) of harmful bacteria as CGI animated organisms biding their time on the top of garbage can lids until they are transferred, via small, unsuspecting child, to a door handle to cause unbridled havoc. The book also reminds me that when my 92 year old grandmother suggests that I gargle salt water to relieve my sore throat, she is speaking not only as a concerned grandma but as a believer in the home remedies instilled in her by her experiences with American tradition and culture.
I was also intrigued by Tomes’s assertion that “by setting themselves up as experts on the home, reformers carved out interesting new spheres of social and political influence for themselves” (139). It demonstrates how power is often gained through the ostensible “knowledge” of one in contrast to the “ignorance” of another.