Surprising ways past epidemics changed everyday life

Though we’re only a few months into the novel coronavirus pandemic, there have already been plenty of changes made to our everyday life. Handshakes and hugs are out; social distancing is in. Crowded in-person events have been put on hold in favour of group Zoom calls. Face masks have become ubiquitous and may become a permanent lifestyle accessory,  even once the pandemic is over. We’ve gotten into the habit of thoroughly washing our hands for at least 20 seconds, one of the developments that will ideally be the norm from now on. But this isn’t the first time an infectious disease has had a major impact on people’s daily habits. In fact, some things that are commonplace today weren’t always that way and actually have origins in major health crises.

The widespread acceptance of germ theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in a shift in interior design – both in public buildings like hospitals and in private homes. Victorian-era homes were known for their ornate wooden decorations, heavy draperies, and patterned wallpaper and flooring designed to hide dirt and grime. But once people understood that dirt and dust could contain germs that cause infectious disease, there was a shift from dark colours, fabrics, wallpaper, and flooring to stark white interiors, where any dirt was clearly visible.

“I think common sense dictates that if you want to know if the surface is clean, the visual cue is that you’ve used a light colour and there are now dark spots on it. [You can see if] it’s looking grimy,” explains Dr Kelly Wright, who teaches history and specialises in the historic use of colour in architecture. In addition to that, white tiles and linoleum floors were easier to clean than wood, with its natural crevices.

Read on for some tips to make your home look more expensive.

When a person came down with tuberculosis – once known as ‘consumption’ – their skin became pale, and they lost weight as they literally wasted away. While that doesn’t sound like something anyone would find aspirational, between 1780 and 1850, there was “an increasing aestheticisation of tuberculosis that [became] entwined with feminine beauty,” says Dr Carolyn Day, assistant professor of history and author of Consumptive Chic: A History of Fashion, Beauty and Disease. Why? Partially because upper-class women’s predisposition to developing tuberculosis was thought to be based on their appearance. “Tuberculosis enhances those things that are already established as beautiful in women,” she explained, such as thinness and pale skin.

As a result, the rise of the ‘consumptive chic’ look became popular in the mid-1800s. It involved women trying to look as though they had tuberculosis by using makeup to make their skin appear paler, putting blush on their cheeks and red colour on their lips. Once doctors started to prescribe sunbathing as a treatment for consumption, makeup trends went the other way, favouring more tanned skin.

Check out these tricks for naturally glowing skin (no makeup or expensive products required!)

If you’ve been inside an old house and noticed that it doesn’t have much in the way of wardrobes, you’re not imagining things: Built-in robes are a relatively new addition to the home. Prior to that, people kept clothing and other belongings in stand-alone furniture, like armoires. “It used to be that almost everything was [kept] in armoires,” Lloyd Atler, a  former architect and design historian who now teaches sustainable design, tells Reader’s Digest. “When you look at the plans from the turn of the century, the wardrobes are tiny, tiny, tiny – if they exist at all.” The idea behind the built-in wardrobe was that it provided more open space in a room, making it easier to clean during a time when dust was though to transmit germs.

When Ellis Island in New York, for example, opened in 1892, there were six doctors on staff to screen the 200,000 immigrants who passed through the island and into the United States in its first year. But as public-health officials got a better grasp on germ theory and infectious disease, these screenings increased and became more thorough. There were eight doctors examining 500,000 yearly immigrants by 1902. That doubled to 16 doctors three years later, as the number of immigrants jumped to 900,000 per year. By 1916, the medical screenings were a well-oiled machine, and 25 doctors saw immigrants via four inspection lines that ran simultaneously.

But for many immigrants passing through Ellis Island, the most traumatic part of the inspection was the screening for trachoma – a highly infectious eye disease that could cause blindness and even death. In order to check for this condition, doctors would use a buttonhook to flip a person’s eyelid open to check for signs of the disease. Though the test for trachoma is no longer part of the screening process, the government has continued to perform medical checks on immigrants.

The modern world, however, has never seen a disease quite like the one we’re facing today.

Epidemics result in an increase in deaths, which makes it necessary to figure out how to deal with the influx of human remains. Because of the long-held (and now debunked) belief that dead bodies transmit infectious disease, it has made societies over the past several centuries rethink how they bury its dead. Probably the best-known example of a change in burial customs is the tradition of burying human remains six feet underground. This practice originated during an outbreak of the plague in 1665 in England. The mayor of London stipulated that “all the graves shall be at least six feet deep” in the “Orders Conceived and Published by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, Concerning the Infection of the Plague.”

Having a tiny waist was another part of the ‘consumptive chic’ look. At first, this was a boon for the already-popular corset, as well as dresses that emphasised protruding collarbones. But soon, corsets became the target of doctors who believed that the tight-fitting, restrictive garments could harm those with tuberculosis. In 1793, Samuel Thomas Von Sömmerring, a physician and well-known anatomist, took this one step further, writing that the compression of ribs and internal organs due to wearing a corset could lead to tuberculosis, cancer, and scoliosis.

But corsets didn’t disappear overnight. Instead, women began wearing so-called ‘health corsets,’ which featured a looser fit, before they fell out of fashion altogether around the turn of the century. Though we may not wear corsets anymore, foundation garments are still an essential part of our wardrobe.

When new homes were first designed to include indoor plumbing, there was typically one bathroom for the entire family located on the second floor of the house, near the bedrooms. But as infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza became increasingly problematic, some homeowners decided to install a second half-bathroom near the entrance to the house. At this point, most homes had daily deliveries of coal and ice, meaning that the delivery people were not only entering your home but also your neighbours’ homes – potentially bringing germs with them. “The iceman is coming right into your kitchen, and if the iceman needs to use the bathroom, you don’t want him using your family bathroom,” Wright explains. “So the half-bath made perfect sense for visitors to the house.”

Find out which bathroom etiquette rules people break all the time – but shouldn’t.

Though vaccines appear to be a product of modern science, they have existed in some form for centuries. Specifically, there’s evidence that the Chinese developed a method of smallpox inoculation as early as 1000 BCE. This practice first spread to Africa and Turkey, and later to Europe and the Americas, according to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. More commonly, Edward Jenner gets credit for the first smallpox vaccine in 1796, when he took material from a blister of someone infected with cowpox and inoculated it into another person’s skin, in an attempt to control the smallpox epidemic in England.

Large-scale inoculation – in the form of the shot we know today – began in the 1940s, as scientists began developing vaccines for other infectious diseases like diphtheria and whooping cough. By the 1960s, there were vaccines for other infectious diseases, including measles, mumps, and rubella. And though an early version of the flu shot was developed in the 1940s, there were initial problems with efficacy. Several decades of research later, in 1984, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began recommending annual flu shots for people in high-risk groups (older adults and the immunocompromised).

Tuberculosis didn’t only affect women’s beauty and fashion. It also impacted men’s grooming – namely, their beards. Around the turn of the century, beards were all the rage. But once doctors and the public better understood how germ theory worked and how infectious diseases spread, beards became a major public-health target. In 1901, William H. Park, a doctor at the New York Board of Health, banned milk-delivery men from having beards, specifying that “there is real menace to the milk if the dairyman is bearded” because “he may have tuberculosis and the dried sputum may accumulate on his beard and drop from it into the milk.”

But it wasn’t only milkmen who had to worry about beards transmitting the disease. According to Park, “The beard, particularly when damp, may become an ideal germ carrier, and on an unclean man would have great facility for the transmission of disease.” As a result, a clean-shaven look was preferable. To make it easier to maintain that look without having to visit a barbershop, Gillette invented disposable razors in 1900, allowing men to remove their facial hair themselves.