Concept
Hygiene
Overview
Hygiene is a set of practices performed to preserve health.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "Hygiene refers to conditions and practices that help to maintain health and prevent the spread of diseases." Personal hygiene refers to maintaining the body's cleanliness. Hygiene activities can be grouped into the following: home and everyday hygiene, personal hygiene, medical hygiene, sleep hygiene, and food hygiene. Home and every day hygiene includes hand washing, respiratory hygiene, food hygiene at home, hygiene in the kitchen, hygiene in the bathroom, laundry hygiene, and medical hygiene at home.
While often equated with cleanliness in common usage, hygiene is a term encompassing the personal practices and environmental conditions that maintain health and prevent disease.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Hygiene is discussed.
Hygiene is the only useful part of medicine, and hygiene is rather a virtue than a science. Temperance and industry are man's true remedies; work sharpens his appetite and temperance teaches him to control it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
Again, what reaches unto its Perfector and attaches itself to Him is safe against corruption, all the more so if even during disconnection from Him it has not undergone corruption. Wherefore the soul after death shall ever remain and continue unwavering [and undying] and attached to this noble essence, which is called generic universal mind, and in the language of the lawgivers the Divine Knowledge. As to the other…
Avicenna, A Compendium on the Soul
states what it is; author linked in the graph
The divine comedy of modern medicine and hygiene is one of the human epics yet to be written; but when composed it may prove no unworthy companion of the medieval epic of other worldly beatific visions. The great ideas of the eighteenth century, that expansive epoch of moral perception which ranks in illumination and fervor along with classic Greek thought, the great ideas of the indefinitely continuous progress of…
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
states what it is; names the idea
After all, it is the life that tells; and mind‐cure has developed a living system of mental hygiene which may well claim to have thrown all previous literature of the _Diätetik der Seele_ into the shade. This system is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism: “Pessimism leads to weakness.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
opens on it; names the idea
What might be called hygiene of the nerves has been much too little studied. Industrial psychology, it is true, has made elaborate investigations into fatigue, and has proved by careful statistics that if you go on doing something for a sufficiently long time you will ultimately get rather…
Bertrand Russell, The conquest of happiness
opens on it; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Hygiene
Related ideas
- French language
- Fiqh
- Avicenna
- Greek language
- Book of Rites
- Manusmriti
- Hadith
- Transaction Publishers
- Fustat
- The Canon of Medicine
- India
- Indonesia
- Heian period
- Korea
- Byzantine Empire
- Middle Ages
- Medicine
- Islamic world
- Culture
- Middle East
- Marco Polo
- Yuan dynasty
- Warring States period
- Yoruba people
Place in the tradition
Part of Evolution of morality.