The Cry And The Covenant; by Morton Thompson.

It is a shock and a surprise to realise that hygiene was so low in Europe, that doctors did not wash hands after dealing with dead bodies (what else and who else also did not wash hands after what other activities is left to imagination) and the one person who did realise that washing hands after other activities and before treating the next patient - especially the women in childbirth that died regularly and those deaths were treated as if normal and expected occurrence - this one person who not only realised it but proved it with his own experience in insisting people working with him wash hands before touching the patients and saw deaths drop drastically, was ridiculed.

A few decades ago a colleague from Bavaria ridiculed people who bathed or showered every day, with a "they must be from a dirty country, we don't need to shower more than once a month" - and a landlord in UK waved away a shower not working as a non sequitur with a "oh, we don't shower that often". Hopefully the people working in medicine or in food preparation and service industry do wash hands as often as we expect or wish them to!