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'The Great Dust Heap at King's Cross,' an 1837 watercolor by E.H. Dixon
An exhibition held at London's Wellcome Collection explores the good and bad sides of dirt and its role in history, art, science and medicine.
Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life ranges from 17th-century Holland to 21st century New York, depicting how dirt affected civilizations throughout history, the Associated Press reported.
"Dirt is something we make and encounter every day," said senior curator at Wellcome Collection James Peto, adding that the exhibition explores both the good and bad sides of dirt.
"Some of it, in the right quantities and the right place, is good for us," he said. "Soil in the sense of 'soiled sheets' is bad, but soil where vegetables grow feeds us."
"And it's where we all end up in the end," he went on to say.
Although people are disgusted by filth's intimacy and omnipresence, it also shows progress in the sense that societies always face the challenge of finding new ways to dispose of it.
Dirt has also created commercial opportunities and many make money from it such as river-combing mudlarks and the "toshers" who hunted for treasures in 19th-century sewers.
"The relationship between dirt and commerce is a long-standing one," said another curator, Kate Forde.
"In medieval times, London's waste was sold to farmers outside the city to fertilize crops." Today, electricity is generated from incinerating some of the city's waste.
The exhibition also shows the relation between dirt and diseases which have caused many historic hygiene triumphs.
Joseph Bazalgette's network of sewers, which saved the Victorian London from its "great stink" and are still in use today, is only one of the contributions dirt has made to human communities.
Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life has dedicated one room to a filthy 19th-century Glasgow infirmary where patients with a broken limb had a 90 percent chance of amputation.
The infirmary was transformed when Joseph Lister discovered that washing with carbolic acid before surgery greatly reduced the infection rate.
The exhibition also explores bad sides of dirt noting that "We live in unmistakably filthy times," and dealing with dust is still a huge undertaking.
Visitors also face weird artworks, such as sculptures made from human feces and a pile of bricks containing dust donated by London households, including one containing a pinch of carpet dust from Benjamin Franklin's house.
Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life will be held until Aug. 31, 2011.
TE/HRF
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