People Thought Bathing Made Them Sick in Medival Era

For most of the medieval era, the people were actually pretty good about bathing. They went to public baths regularly and did a fairly good job at cleaning themselves—for a while, anyway.

All that changed, though, after the Black Plague hit. In the chaos of seeing two-thirds of the world die from disease, the people of Europe started panicking. They wanted to find anything they could to blame this on, and they picked bathing. The plague had spread, some doctors declared, because people were washing too often.

They told people that water weakened their bodies and widened their pores, leaving them susceptible to plagues and diseases, and started ordering people to stop all forms of bathing immediately.[4] “By no means,” one doctor warned his patients, “should you wash your face.”


do they hate being clean that much?