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These Historic Figures Should Have Been Famous for their Weird Habits

Khalid Elhassan June 22, 2022 37 min

King Farouk, left, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imgur

23. A Guilty Habit

Habit Facts - James Boswell — James Boswell. Google Arts Project

Every now and then, James Boswell felt bad about his bad habit. However, he couldn’t help himself, and kept coming back. As he wrote in his diary entry of May 10th, 1763: ” At the bottom of the Hay-market I picked up a strong jolly young damsel, and taking her under the Arm I conducted her to Westminster-Bridge, and then in armour compleat did I engage her upon this noble Edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us amused me much. Yet after the brutish appetite was sated I could not but despise myself for being so closely united with such a low Wretch.“

The “Armour”, which Boswell also referred to in his diary as a “cundum”, was supposed to protect against venereal disease, but proved ineffective. The fact that his first streetwalker, when he was nineteen, gave him gonorrhea, neither extinguished Boswell’s faith in his “Armour” nor dampened his enthusiasm for women. By the time he was twenty-nine, Boswell had been with at least sixty ladies of the night, from whom he contracted gonorrhea an astonishing nineteen times. His friends treated his frequent VD infections as a running joke. However, considering the primitive medical care of the eighteenth century, the bouts were probably too painful for Boswell to appreciate the humor.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.