A Hint About the Affliction That Kept Marat in the Bathtub

The radical French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat died, famously, in a bathtub. He was soaking in one when his assassin, Charlotte Corday, plunged a kitchen knife into his chest in 1793. And he was soaking in a bath because of a mysterious condition that left his skin intensely itchy and blistered. The bath was his only relief, and the bath was where he died.

In the centuries since, people have speculated endlessly about the origins of his skin condition. Marat himself blamed the time he spent hiding from his political enemies, sleeping in cellars about conditions with ever more complicated names: syphilis, scrofula, scabies, leprosy, diabetic candidiasis, atopic eczema, seborrheic dermatitis, dermatitis herpetiformis, bullous pemphigoid, and histiocytic proliferative disorder. Recently, geneticists decided to look at the only physical evidence that remains: the bloodstained newspapers he was annotating at the time he was killed.