Hand washing, and specifically soap, is one of the most important inventions of the modern era.  The reason we are able to have such good public infrastructure: like plumbing, public transportation, good quality roads, etc, is because we have public hygiene.  Cities are no longer incredibly unclean places to live, and a fever is no longer a death sentence.  So we see that hand washing is important for almost every element of daily life, but it is most important in providing health care.

Before hand washing, disease carrying agents were often transferred  between healthcare providers and patients.  This was a huge problem, and it often meant that people wouldn’t go to the hospital if they were sick, especially since doctors and nurses come into contact with some of the most disease ridden parts of society.  It was, for a long time, much better to stay home and tough it out, perhaps applying some home remedy now and then, than to go to the doctor unless you were extremely ill.  On everyone’s hands there are two types of microbes: one is resident flora, which live under the superficial layers of your skin, and are actually beneficial to your personal health, protecting you from more dangerous microbes, and the other is transient flora.  Transient flora are microbes that pass over your skin daily, they get to you through people that you meet, surfaces that you touch, and the spaces that you walk through; these are the types of microbes that you don’t want your doctor to pass over to you when you’re sick, that your doctor doesn’t want passed over to them from you, and that are killed when you wash your hands.

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