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Did Benjamin Franklin take naked “air baths”?
VERDICTTRUE
By his own account. In a July 1768 letter to the French physician Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, he said cold water baths were too violent for him, so he rose early and sat in his chamber “without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour,” reading or writing. He called it a tonic bath and reported no ill consequences.
The receipts
- Benjamin Franklin to Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, 28 July 1768, Founders Online, National Archives
The comedy version
The untold story of Benjamin Franklin, who won the Revolution with an essay about wind.
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