Jennifer Le Zotte (@jennylezotte)
is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is the author of "From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies." Jacob Steere-Williams (@steerewilliams) is an associate professor of history at the College of Charleston and author of the forthcoming book "The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practice of Epidemiology in Victorian England." The views expressed here are theirs. Read more opinion on CNN.
(CNN)Pandemics, even as they cause untold suffering, do more than create new problems. They reveal long-held cultural attitudes, approaches to faith in governance and differing beliefs about individual rights and trust in science. Historically speaking, these myriad responses reemerge from pandemic to pandemic in recycling patterns of seemingly historical truisms. We ignore, we deny, we blame.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, an outrageous suggestion by President Donald Trump on Thursday — that injecting household disinfectants might help those suffering from the disease — is being met rightly with vehement pushback from scientists and even the manufacturers of the products. Shortly after the president's remarks, Reckitt Benckiser, the British company that makes Lysol and Dettol, issued a statement soundly refuting the notion: "As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route)."
It's critical for everyone to heed the message about how dangerous this suggestion is — but it's also important to realize that this is not the first time that disinfectants appeared at the center of a health crisis or as part of a politicized resistance to sound medical advice. There is a longer history here that can help to frame the latest disbelief and bewilderment at the president's remarks.
A dark history, fueled by xenophobia
In the late 19th century, when the germs responsible for dangerous infectious diseases like cholera, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis were discovered, carbolic acid emerged as the first widely used disinfectant to combat the spread of disease. A byproduct of coal gas production, carbolic acid was used by Scottish officials to treat the dangerous miasmatic smells emanating from sewers. In the 1860s, well-known surgeon Joseph Lister pioneered techniques of anti-septic and aseptic surgery using carbolic acid-soaked dressings on wounds and carbolic spray during surgeries. Laboratory researchers like the German bacteriologist Robert Koch agreed that it "kills if of considerable strength and acting for a long period of time."
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But quickly there was widespread recognition of the dangers of carbolic acid: damaged tissue on surgeon's hands, accidental poisoning and suicides. Samuel Rideal, an English health officer, chemist, and author of the 1895 "Disinfection and Disinfectants," noted that carbolic acid had been inhaled, ingested and absorbed through the human skin "with dangerous, and even fatal, effects."
The pandemic of bubonic plague in the mid-1890s, which killed more than 12 million people worldwide, provided the stage for carbolic acid to rise to unprecedented use, despite the warnings of scientists. The fuel was often xenophobia, stigmatizing non-Western peoples as unique spreaders of infection.
Pandemic uncertainty produced horrific results
British health officers forced countless indigenous peoples in port cities in Asia and Africa into dipping vats of carbolic acid. Dipping was a veterinary practice used to control skin diseases in cattle and sheep. But in a moment of pandemic uncertainty, Western governments turned to carbolic for the cure. It was violent, harmful, and oppressive.
A surviving photograph published in the British weekly illustrated periodical "Black and White" from 1898 in Karachi provides a rare glimpse: "All natives who are suspect of having been in contact with sources of contagion are required to visit one of these tanks, and to take a dip in the water," the article noted, "the natives do not, as a rule, take kindly to the process, but it is insisted on." Dipping humans in vats of skin-burning carbolic acid was undoubtedly a dark moment in modern history, but it wasn't an isolated event.
In the early 20th century, American health officers erected disinfection stations along the 2,000-mile border between California to Texas. During a particularly explosive outbreak of typhus fever in 1915, US physicians ordered all individuals attempting to enter American soil to strip naked and be doused with disinfectant. There was again backlash amongst those submitted to such intrusive practices, as the not so well-known 1917 Bath Riots at the Santa Fe Bridge demonstrate.
Though the pandemic died down, the carbolic fervor did not, despite medical evidence that carbolic acid was injurious and in some cases fatal. During the same years of the early 20th century, which also saw the rise of the 1918 influenza pandemic, mass-marketed household disinfectants emerged on the market. Crude carbolic was now sold with clearly-marked "poison," and "not to be taken" but a host of lookalike products emerged: powders, sprays, liquids, carbolic soap ("Lifebuoy's soap), toothpaste (Calvert's) and the snake-oil products like Carbolic Smoke Ball used to "treat" influenza.
A 'safer' alternative's unsafe uses
Lysol came on the scene in this period as a safer alternative to carbolic acid, which touted its replacement of the toxic carbolic acid with a substance called cresol, a less poisonous and more effective germ killer. For more than 70 years, Lysol was sold to medical professionals and consumers as a safe product, whose (sometimes obliquely) suggested uses ranged from wound disinfection to birth control. Beginning in the 1920s, Lysol douche was covertly advertised as a contraceptive in the United States and Canada, as well as a means of dispelling "feminine odors," all through the thinly veiled language of "feminine hygiene."
According to historian Andrea Tone, by 1911 doctors had already recorded five deaths — and many burns and injuries — from so-called "uterine irrigation" with Lysol. Yet by 1940, commercial douching, including with Lysol, led the market in birth control. Women responded to advertisers' assertions of Lysol's value to maintain a fresh youthfulness and to dispel " calendar fears." Despite repeated complaints and lawsuits, ads like this one continued to promise that Lysol was "gentle" enough to "not harm delicate tissue." Lysol as a pregnancy preventative simply did not work. According to Tone, a 1933 study showed that more than half the women who douched as birth control became pregnant. Tone also recounts that the court found Lysol's manufacturer was not to blame for injuries allegedly inflicted by the product (in 1935, the company contested a lawsuit by arguing that one person's burns were the result of "an allergy to Lysol."
When asked about Lysol's past use as a vaginal douching product and contraceptive in 2018, Reckitt Benckiser's marketing director released a statement: "For more than 100 years, Lysol has been dedicated to protecting families from the harmful consequences of germs — from cholera at the turn of the 20th century, to the flu virus in the present day. Like many consumer household brands, as knowledge of health and personal care evolved over the last century, so did the usage of Lysol. Lysol has evolved from a personal care and surface care brand to primarily a surface care brand, with Lysol cleansers, disinfectants and hand soaps being used widely in homes, schools and businesses around the world."
Sexism and mistrust in sound science
Among those in Lysol's target audience of young, middle-class white women, societally induced shame over natural female functions supported Lysol's use as a refreshing vaginal deodorant. Douching is far more likely to eradicate good bacteria in the vaginal ecosystem than to "maintain healthful youthfulness," as Lysol ads suggested. It's important to note that Lysol's formula was changed in 1952 to remove cresol. Yet even today, douching persists in many parts of the world — spurred largely by persistent cultural norms and advertising for a variety of product — along with the belief that women's nether regions are somehow problematic.
But more than taboo or mores, it was cold, hard laws that helped to promote the popular belief that Lysol douches could prevent pregnancy. The Comstock Law of 1873 forbidding the decimation of "obscene" materials meant that circulating plainspoken contraceptive information, as well as actual products, was illegal throughout the United States. Purity crusaders considered sexual activity for purposes other than procreation (read: women having sex for enjoyment) as "unnatural." With the help of the Comstock Act, they sought to eradicate birth control altogether. Instead, purity crusaders encouraged the burgeoning of a physically punitive market in bodily disinfectants. In this case, the fuel was sexist resistance to giving women educated control over their reproductive lives.
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Despite President Trump's suggestions (which he attempted later to deflect as sarcasm), there have not yet been reports of individual experiments with bleach injections or Lysol cocktails since Thursday. Perhaps there is enough common sense and historical memory to know that these are indeed misguided suggestions or even political acts themselves. Less than an urgent search for a cure, Trump's dangerous casual musings demonstrate mistrust in sound science and a political Hail Mary.
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