Looking back in time, people’s personal hygiene, fashion choices, medical treatments, and more can seem disgusting.  When confronted with gross practices, our first reaction can be to dismiss our ancestors as primitive, ignorant, or just silly.  Before such judgments, however, we should try to understand the reasons behind these practices and recognize that our own descendants will judge some of what we do as gross.  Here at George Washington’s Ferry Farm and Historic Kenmore, we’ve come to describe our efforts to understand the historically disgusting as “Colonial Grossology.”  In this video, we examine three ways that daily life in the 18th century was sort of gross.