In Konstantin Kashin’s and Ethan Pollock’s paper Public Health and Bathing in Late Imperial Russia: A Statistical Approach, they write: “By the second half of the 19th Century, dozens of medical researchers attempted to give scientific backing to claims about the importance of the banya for health and hygiene. Books and articles… reported on the use of banyasin treating a full range of medical conditions. Chronic muscle pain, dysentery, hemorrhoids, influenza, emphysema, obesity, rheumatism, scabies, scrofula, syphilis, typhus and typhoid fever were just a few of the diseases that doctors believed could be treated or prevented by visiting the banya.”