Henry's Medical Paranoia

Henry VIII was extremely paranoid on many different areas and one of them was medicine. He distrusted his doctors and during his reign, he began mixing his own treatments which included a cure for ulcers - probably inspired by the nasty ulcer he had on his leg. The King even used the prescriptions he came up with for himself.

Henry was very afraid of illnesses and every time there was an outbreak of plague, sweating sickness or the like, the King would run away till one of his more secluded castles where he felt safe from the horrible diseases.

Henry had a fear of germs which led to another point that separated the king from the rest of his court: he enjoyed regular bathing and was - unlike his fellow Tudors - convinced that bathing was an effective way of keeping away the germs he feared so much. His fear of diseases where transferred to his son, Edward. When Henry finally had the son he had wished for, the King ordered that the child's apartments should be scrubbed down regularly and the boy himself was to be washed on a daily basis. Perhaps this overly attention to cleanliness combined with a world that did not share his point of view on this point and was notoriously filthy, a part of the reason for why Edward would be so sensitive to influenza later on in life.