Look at what Thomas Moulton, a friar and doctor, wrote around 1531:
“Use no baths or stoves, nor sweat too much, because it opens the pores of the body. The venomous air enters and infects the blood.”
This idea began two hundred years before, when the Black Plague killed 30% of Europe’s population. In 1348, the doctors of the University of Paris suggested closing all bathhouses. People, even kings, avoided water for the following five hundred years.
A Russian ambassador wrote this about King Louis XIV:
“His Majesty stinks like a wild animal.”
friar: n. a member of a Catholic order that promises to stay poor
Unit 5
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