The Compass Chronicles. The dark side of cleanliness

According to the Bombay Famine Code in the 19th century, upon the discovery of even three cases of cholera, entire troops of sepoys would have to vacate a camp. Not only that, they must march at “right angles” to the wind, leeward like a platoon of crabs walking sideways — wherever that may lead.

The reason for this bizarre drill was an erroneous belief that cholera spread through air. Colonial historian David Arnold quips that “it was in this way that the prisoners of Agra Jail found themselves camping in the spacious and elegant gardens of the Taj Mahal and Akbar’s mausoleum during a cholera outbreak of 1856.”

A typical summary of the city from the Calcutta Gazette in the 1880s reads pleasantly enough: “Weather — cooler than last week. Harvesting of rubhee crops in progress. A storm of wind, hail, and rain during the week have done some damage to mango and opium. Two cases of cholera reported... Prices stationary.” It is not immediately obvious from such reports, however, as Barbara Hodgson writes ( In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine, and Patent Medicines , 2001) that opium was the only relief available from persistent waves of “cholera and dysentery (which) regularly ripped through communities, its victims often dying from debilitating diarrhoea.”

“Nevertheless, the old airborne theory died very hard,” commented Sir Leonard Rogers MD, at the Indian Science Congress in Bombay, 1919. He informed the audience that “in 1883 a new era dawned when a German bacteriologist (Robert Koch) announced the discovery of the comma bacillus of cholera during an outbreak in Egypt. The organism is indeed present in such enormous numbers in the rice-water stools of severe cholera cases…” In fact, it was after travelling to Calcutta that Koch finally made this discovery in 1884.

One could still see the remnant memory of these invisible, aerial horrors in Arthur Conan Doyle’s science-fiction novel The Poison Belt (1913), featuring the hero Professor Challenger, in which the Earth’s orbit passes through a cloud of poisonous ether, threatening to destroy all humanity.

The relationship between the British empire and its colonies had a lot of similarities with human beings and bacteria, especially when we ponder those that live inside our intestines (or “colon”). If the East India Company let too many of its subjects die in wars or of poverty and disease, who would buy the opium that financed it? Who would it rule over? And if prevailing notions of cleanliness and hygiene made our living environment (and our bodies) completely sterilised, would the human race survive?

The 1908 Russian Nobel laureate Ilya Metchnikoff considered “the colon as a primitive organ that had stored our wild ancestors’ waste”. It would shrink and become vestigial, he seemed to suggest, as mankind learns to prolong the life of individuals, flaming one of our oldest fantasies of immortality. Meanwhile the surgeon William Arbuthnot Lane started removing colons entirely to cure constipation. In the same vein, the American Henry Cotton prescribed removal of sex glands and internal organs to cure schizophrenia and depression.

The modern city and the home resemble a quarantined, colonial camp in which we are made to “march sideways” by an empire of hygiene that fears microbes because they are invisible. In her very successful book Darm mit Charme (translated as Gut , 2014) Giulia Enders asserts that “As it happens, the higher the hygiene standards in a country, the higher that nation’s incidence of allergies and autoimmune diseases.” Furthermore, “More than 95% of the world’s bacteria are harmless to humans. Many are extremely beneficial.”

Supporters of the ‘old friends hypothesis’, such as Graham Rook, argue that our vital exposures are not the childhood infections, but the ones we co-evolved our immune systems with from the time of hunter-gatherers, more than 10,000 years ago. It is this symbiosis which is under attack by the urban paranoia around cleanliness. “We are not individuals. We are ecosystems with microbial partners that are involved in the development and function of essentially every organ, including the brain. In fact we have more microbes in our guts than we have human cells in our bodies,” writes Rook.

Alongside a growing number of medical researchers, gastroenterologist Joel Weinstock is observing that “everything from hay fever and asthma to diabetes and multiple sclerosis are on the rise in developed countries but remain relatively uncommon in undeveloped countries,” due to the lack of exposure to intestinal worms. In this view, excessive hygiene emerges as a kind of environmental collapse through bactericide.

Rohit Gupta explores the history of science as Compasswallah; @fadesingh

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