21. Misreported Victorian Fact: The Health Benefit of Beards
The popularity of beards in the nineteenth century had much to do with Victorian ideals of rugged manliness. Beards are prominent visual markers of maleness, so thick facial hair fit in great with the new zeitgeist. It was not just changed cultural norms and mores, though. The renewed popularity of thick facial hair was helped in no small part by misreported medical “facts” about the health benefits of beards. In the mid-nineteenth century, doctors began to encourage men to rock thick beards, as a means to ward off illness. Although the medical benefits of beards as imagined by Victorian doctors are nonexistent, it makes sense why many theorized that they were healthy.
The Industrial Revolution saw the burning of coal in prodigious quantities, that brought about prodigious levels of air pollution. Add to that the then-new-fangled germ theory, that many physicians had heard of but hadn’t yet fully understood, and it is understandable that there was plenty of concern with tiny bad things floating in the air. Doctors reasoned that thick facial hair could filter out bad air and the bad little particulates that floated in it. Some even expressed the medical opinion that beards could prevent sore throats. Of course, as we now know, beards can’t filter air – harmful germs and aerial pollutants are too small for facial hair to block them. Beards actually do the opposite of what Victorian doctors thought. Rather than filter out harmful bacteria, germs and other tiny harmful particles can actually get stuck to beards, which thus increase instead of reduce the odds of infections.
