I realize now that their revelations caused conflict, challenging the status quo of medicine. Pasteur and Semmelweis, who pioneered germ theory, were heroes. In my teens, I read Microbe Hunters, a fat brown book in my family's shelves. Could it be that the clean-hands practice I was taught as a child was in itself a political act? “When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person.” The symbolic cleansing made him all the more complicit as he turned Jesus over to the mob.Īll these references involved power and/or the abuse of power. Hand-washing also comes into another Biblical image about the judgment of Pontius Pilate. “For three dollars a day my sisters make my blouse,” the group sings. The garment is sewn by underpaid, at-risk workers in El Salvador and Haiti. In Bernice Johnson Reagon's lyrics, the blouse comes to represent profits for corporations trading cotton (Cargill), supplying petroleum (Exxon), and manufacturing synthetic fabric (DuPont). ![]() The music of Sweet Honey in the Rock expressed it through the image of a cotton-and-polyester blouse, bought at a discount at a Sears department store. T he symbolism of hand-washing continued to haunt me, as if there were always a need to exonerate oneself, to get clean. Her lady-in-waiting explains to the attending doctor, “I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.”Ĭlean hands will never absolve her of inciting Macbeth to murder the Duncan, the king. “What, will these hands ne'er be clean?” she asks obsessively in her sleepwalking scene. I joked with friends that I was constantly auditioning for Lady Macbeth. I searched for other clean-hands images, while day after day I felt alternately more safe and more vulnerable, washing not only my hands but all my groceries. ![]() “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? 'He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.”Ĭlean hands meant my allegiance to an Old Testament God, and I couldn't say I was a believer. I had clean hands and hoped I had a pure heart.Įventually, it occurred to me to look up the Biblical text. I timed myself one day: From getting up in the morning and including trips to the bathroom at night, I washed my hands 21 times and used a hand sanitizer five times. PUTNEY - I n spring 2020, when COVID-19 became a daily threat, I quoted to myself the fragment of a verse from Psalms, recalled from Sunday School days in Tennessee: “he that hath clean hands and a pure heart.”
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