ABSTRACT
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, racial hygiene, and sex hygiene. 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. The concept of hygiene served, and continues to serve, as a vital conduit between the control and management of specific populations and the internal monitoring of the self. Hygiene entered the American lexicon alongside efforts to cope with the country’s burgeoning urban populations. State agencies, physicians, and moral crusaders, coalescing under the banner of public hygiene, sought new ways to alter and regulate normative behavior, including norms of sexual desire and expression. From the start, public hygiene interventions imposed mechanisms of surveillance and control disproportionately on the socially vulnerable.
