Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (Wellcome Collection)

Our relationship with dirt is complex and ambivalent. Dirt is waste, excrement, rubbish, bacteria—but what then is soil, where crops grow, and to which our bodies eventually return? Dirt may pose significant risks to our health, but it is also vital to our existence.

Lavishly illustrated, this exciting and often startling book is a provocative introduction to a vast and complex subject. Five writers and a graphic novelist pursue different themes from a range of perspectives in order to examine dirt and its contradictions, including personal grooming, the politics of dirt in the home, city sanitation, and waste disposal.

Virginia Smith is a freelance historian and research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Rosie Cox is a senior lecturer at Birkbeck College, London

Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist.

Rose George is a freelance writer.

Peter Brimblecombe is professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of East Anglia, UK

Brian Ralph is an illustrator and lecturer at the Maryland Institute of Art.