At a United Church of Christ congregation in the suburbs of Chicago, Communion servers now slice up bread into bite-sized bits before distributing Communion; they no longer offer congregants a loaf from which to tear a hunk of bread. In the interest of keeping fingers away from communion wine, communicants at All Saints' Chapel in Sewanee, Tenn., are now instructed not to dip their Eucharistic bread into the cup but rather to sip the cup directly, since hands are often more infectious than mouths.

At Cornell University, the Episcopal chaplain, Clark West, has reminded worshippers that they will receive the fullness of the Eucharist if they receive only "one kind"-that is, the wafer and not the wine. "We have alcoholics among us for whom this has been the practice for years without any noticeably adverse effects," quips Mr. West. To emphasize this, he has, on occasion, used a longer liturgical formula, which names the host as itself both "the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Less reverently, Mr. West has taken to calling the bottle of Purell hand sanitizer, which now sits prominently on the credence table, the post-modern lavabo. (A lavabo is the bowl a priest uses to wash his or her hands in the Eucharist.)

These liturgical modifications are, of course, all being undertaken in response to H1N1-or, perhaps more precisely, in response to fears about H1N1. But if H1N1 is new, American Christians' choice to let fears about hygiene and health shape Eucharistic practice are not. In the late 19th century, new knowledge about germs-and pastors' keen desire to be regarded as, in the words of one New York clergyman, "thoroughly imbued with the scientific spirit"-prompted many clergy, especially in Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches, to set aside the common cup in favor of individual communion cups (think shot glasses).

That change did not come easily or without debate and old-fashioned organizing on the part of both clergy and physicians. In November 1899, the Brooklyn Pathological Society convened a symposium called "The Pathology of the Common Communion Cup." Doctors and ministers gathered to review what they knew of epidemiology and to urge the use of individual cups at communion. The ministers in attendance did not take much convincing: "My own feeling in regard to the common cup is one of positive repugnance," said one.

Those churches that did move from the common cup to individual cups lost something. They lost the imagery of the church's being, to paraphrase Paul, one body because we drink of one cup. Indeed, fin de siècle advocates for reform understood quite well that the changes they were making were not just about the health of people's physical bodies, but also about the ecclesial and social body. They urged adoption of individual cups not only because of new theories about germs but also, explicitly, because they were troubled by white, middle-class Christians becoming symbolically joined to other sorts of Americans.

Speaking at the 1899 Brooklyn meeting, Robert J. Kent, the pastor of Brooklyn's Lewis Avenue Congregational Church, made the leap from physical health and moral and spiritual purity: "I would not have the cup pass from the lips of the unclean to the lips of innocence and purity." An ear specialist present at the same symposium told a story of a (presumably white Protestant) woman who had made her home on the Hawaiian Islands for almost 30 years. This long-suffering woman and her husband were always served communion first at church, and, the physician noted approvingly, "had they not been, with the class of people who partook of the cup there, neither of them would have been willing to touch it in any circumstances."

Similar concerns shadowed conversation in the 1980s, when some clergy briefly considered whether, in light of AIDS, the common cup could be abandoned. In the AIDS debates, of course, the "science" that cloaked the desire to keep the wrong sort of people from the common cup was entirely faulty-the stated concern was usually that healthy people would perhaps contract AIDS from the cup, when, in fact, if anyone was put at risk by the common cup it was people whose immune systems had been compromised by HIV.

So far, similar tropes have not surfaced in today's conversations. Said Mr. West, the chaplain at Cornell-a community that has been hit particularly hard by H1N1-"I have not yet sensed any evidence of similar purity issues regarding keeping 'the wrong sorts of people' from the table." Though who knows what will happen if those folks from Penn or Yale show up.

---Ms. Winner is an assistant professor at Duke University's divinity schoo