First up , this article will be discussing phthiriasis , a disease that may or may not exist , rather thanpthiriasis , the pubic crab worm that definitely do . Now that we have that confusion out of the manner , on with the horror show .
Imagine this : you notice cysts starting to reverberate up all over your body . Then one day , whether you ca n’t resist a gelt or you just trance yourself on a door frame , you give up the cyst and swarms of insects come pouring out of your rotting flesh . Your consistence slowly gets eaten away by these insects , until you die , more insect than human . story of this strange grim disease have endured through history and across culture . But does it really exist ?
Aristotle mentioned phthiriasis in theHistory of Animalsin 350 BCE , describingcarnivorous insects that " inhabit on the juices of endure flesh " as generate out of the flesh of animate being . " When louse are coming there is a form of pocket-size eruption seeable , unaccompanied by any dismissal of purulent affair ; and if you prick an animal in this consideration at the office of eruption , the lice jumping out,“he drop a line .
Other accounts , such as that by Diodorus Siculus centuries later around 50 BCE , identify winged louse go forth from the bodies of North African people who ate locust , eat away at their form before they emerged through holes in the skin .
One affair many write up tend to have in common , aside from bring in the lector itchy , is that when they remark afflicted someone they lean to be those recall morally tainted . Several account assign the death of the papistical dictator Sulla to phthiriasis , including Plutarch and Pliny the Elder . harmonise to Plutarch , the tyrant ’s build turned only to lice . He hired workers to wipe by the pests , but they retain coming and consuming his form .
" Were not his victims more rosy at the time when dying , whom we feel for today when Sulla is universally hated?“Pliny indite . " Come , was not the finis of his life more cruel than the calamity of all the victims of his proscriptions , when his torso ate itself away and bred its own torments ? "
The tales , as Dr Jan Bondeson wrote in a 1998 paper , Phthiriasis : the riddle of the crappy disease , often depict the disease as a punishment from God against hoi polloi who have done wrong . In an account by Lactantius ( c. 250 - 325 CE ) , know to be pious , an emperor moth that refuse to receipt the Christian god was order to have been eaten forth down to the bone by vermin , while his torso became mummified , and his eyes abound out his sockets .
These tales continued for centuries , right up until the 1730s when they stopped wholly for just over 70 years . Doctors began to interrogate the disease ’s existence , in particular the claims that pulp could spontaneously generate louse from within . Entomologists had their back , being skeptical of the ability of lice to hold out and breed beneath the cutis , without oxygen to keep them alert .
harmonize to Bondeson , a German doubter by the name of Dr Husemann reviewed historical accounts of the disease in 1856 and resolve it never live at all . Nevertheless , it continued to be referenced among doctors well up until around the 1870s , after which there have been no casing at all .
So , does it exist ? Well , the solution to that is a definitive … maybe , but not in the way that it was described in ancient multiplication .
concord toBondeson ’s newspaper , in 1940 , Professor A. C. Oudemans studied a race ofHarpyrynchusmites calledH. tabescentiumthat made him fain to cogitate the disease existed . The tinge are able of burrowing underneath the pelt and live in clusters beneath it . When the hazelnut - sized dirt ball - tumor is edit , the insects pour out with minimum other liquids . Due to the size of it of the clusters , they can go on to kill their legion , score Oudemans and others conceive that the speciescouldhave caused the disease , if it existed .
The only trouble with this is that the mites have been document well in razz , but not a single casing of plague has been determine in human being . Couple this with the fact that no good verbal description or exemplification of the disease have been find , and that in ancient times it was largely only draw as happening to bad people as a divine punishment , most historian and trefoil believe that it likely did n’t exist at all .
Other explanations include that the ancient accounts were identify scabies or infestations found inopen wound .
