Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [65]
According to Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann, bed bugs originally lived in caves and fed on bats. Once humans (and other mammals) began inhabiting these caves, the opportunistic parasites began to feed on them as well. At a certain point, some bed bugs became associated rather exclusively with humans.*98
The first literary reference to bed bugs can be found in Aristophanes’ play The Clouds (423 BCE). A century later, in Historia Animalium, Aristotle assured readers that “bugs are generated from the moisture of living animals, as it dries outside their bodies.”
Monograph of Cimicidae, by Robert Usinger, is the closest thing to a bed bug bible. In his book, Usinger describes how bed bugs were not only present in Greece by 400 BCE but that the Greek physician Dioscorides was advising patients to eat them. For example, a recipe that called for mixing seven wall lice with meat and beans was used as a treatment for malaria. By “holding the beans,” one could counteract the venom of certain snakes.†99 For those who preferred to take their ectoparasites with a chaser, Dioscorides also prescribed downing the bugs with wine or vinegar as means of expelling horse leeches (presumably from a patient’s throat). Additionally, difficult or painful urination (a condition called dysuria) was treated by mashing up some of the insects and inserting them into the stricken orifice. Even sniffing them (the bed bugs, that is) could revitalize a woman who had fallen into a swoon from “strangulation of the vulva.”
Medicinal uses for bed bugs, most of them cribbed from the ancient Greeks, were described in 77 CE by the Roman Gaius Plinius Secundus (better known in modern times as Pliny the Elder).*100
Quintus Serenus was another Roman savant and the author of an early medical text. Here, the author clearly demonstrates how his savant status had been attained in fields other than poetry writing:
Shame not to drink thee Wall-lice mixt with wine,
And Garlik bruised together at noon-day.
Moreover a bruis’d Wall-louse with an egge, repine
Not for to take, ’tis loathsome, yet full good I say.
Serenus does fare slightly better in this next description of an alternative Roman thirst quencher (actually cracking several Top 100 lists of “poems about consumption of bloodsucking insects”).†101
Some men prescribe seven Wall-lice for to drink,
Mingled with water, and one cup they think
Is better than with drowsy death to sink
With no reports on any actual medical benefits derived from eating, drinking, sniffing, or inserting bed bugs, it appears that their medicinal use was yet another instance of treatments that were nearly as bad as the maladies they were meant to alleviate (see chapter 4).
A Treatise of Buggs, written by John Southall, was the first book devoted completely to bed bugs. Published in 1730, it offers readers a tantalizing peek at early pest control, as well as some insights into race relations.
During a visit to the West Indies in 1726, the author was puzzled after encountering “an uncommon negro” with hair, breast, and beard “as white as snow.” The old gentleman was also puzzled by his encounter with the author, noticing that his “Face and Eyes were much swelled with Bugg-Bites,” and he wondered why “white men should let them bite,” rather than doing “something to kill them, as he did.” Presumably having no good answer for that one, Southall accepted “a Calibash full of Liquor” and directions to apply the stuff around his bedroom. The results would have sent a chill down Lou Sorkin’s spine:
The instant I applied it, vast numbers did, (as he told me they would) come out of their Holes, and die before my face.
(John Southall, A Treatise of Buggs, 8)
After waking up bite-free, the author showed