Curtis Valerie A
The Hygiene Centre, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel St, London WC1E 7HT, UK.
J Epidemiol Community Health. 2007 Aug;61(8):660-4. doi: 10.1136/jech.2007.062380.
Hygiene has been studied from multiple perspectives, including that of history. I define hygiene as the set of behaviours that animals, including humans, use to avoid infection. I argue that it has an ancient evolutionary history, and that most animals exhibit such behaviours because they were adaptive. In humans, the avoidance of infectious threats is motivated by the emotion of disgust. Intuition about hygiene, dirt and disease can be found underlying belief about health and disease throughout history. Purification ritual, miasma, contagion, zymotic and germ theories of disease are ideas that spread through society because they are intuitively attractive, because they are supported by evidence either from direct experience or from authoritative report and because they are consistent with existing beliefs. In contrast to much historical and anthropological assertion, I argue that hygiene behaviour and disgust predate culture and so cannot fully be explained as its product. The history of ideas about disease thus is neither entirely socially constructed nor an "heroic progress" of scientists leading the ignorant into the light. As an animal behaviour the proper domain of hygiene is biology, and without this perspective attempts at explanation are incomplete. The approaches of biological anthropology have much to offer the practice of cultural history.
人们已从多个角度研究了卫生学，包括历史角度。我将卫生学定义为动物（包括人类）用以避免感染的一系列行为。我认为它有着古老的进化史，大多数动物表现出此类行为是因为它们具有适应性。在人类中，对传染性威胁的规避是由厌恶情绪驱动的。纵观历史，在关于健康与疾病的信念背后，总能发现有关卫生、污垢和疾病的直觉。净化仪式、瘴气说、传染说、发酵病因说和病菌致病说等观念之所以能在社会中传播，是因为它们直观上具有吸引力，因为它们有直接经验或权威报告提供的证据支持，还因为它们与现有信念相符。与许多历史和人类学论断不同，我认为卫生行为和厌恶情绪先于文化出现，因此不能完全将其解释为文化的产物。疾病观念的历史既非完全由社会构建，也不是科学家引领无知者走向光明的“英勇进步”。作为一种动物行为，卫生学的恰当领域是生物学，没有这个视角，解释就不完整。生物人类学的方法能为文化史研究提供很多帮助。
