So, we need to think about when bed bugs were truly everywhere in our city, yes?

Early twentieth century? The summer of 1908.

Pediatrics, Vol. 68 No. 4 October 1981, pp. 616:

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS RIDS THE PEDIATRIC WARDS OF THE NEW YORK NURSERY AND CHILD’S HOSPITAL OF BEDBUGS

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), one of the most significant American poets of this century, practiced pediatrics for more than 40 years in his birthplace, Rutherford, New Jersey.

As an intern in 1908-1909 at the New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital, he discovered that the persistent screaming of several of his patients, especially at night, was caused by bedbug bites.

In his Autobiography Williams described his tactics as an exterminator.

As it happens, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams is full of bed bug references.

Williams describes Nursery and Child’s Hospital as a six-story brick building in crime-ridden Hell’s Kitchen, across from a block that “was said to be honeycombed with interconnecting tunnels from flat to flat so that a man who had taken it on the lam, once he got inside an entry, was gone from the police forever.”

The history page at Weill Cornell Medical College tells us Nursery and Child’s Hospital cared for “neglected and abandoned infants and poor pregnant women.”

Williams and a nurse discovered 20 bed bugs on a child one night, with the aid of a darkened room and a flashlight, hence the side job as ‘exterminator’:

Next day I got permission to buy half a barrel of bar-sulphur, big pieces round as my wrist. I got myself six old enameled basins, put them on bricks in the center of the wards and other rooms of the building, poured half a pint of alcohol into them and, having had the engineer seal up the cracks around the doors and windows, except those about the exit-door—leaving all used sheets, blankets, and clothing in the building—the weather being fine, I had the nurses deliver each child to me, naked, at the one door that remained accessible. There I wrapped each child in a fresh sterile blanket and carried it to a spot outside the building, in the sun, where I laid it on a board along the south wall. It was very amusing to see them lying there. We took pictures.

Then of course the matches and the running for it:

Outside I sealed the final door. We all for a while stood outside looking in as the sulfur clouds in the room became denser and denser. I could see the damned stuff in the nearest pan bubbling as it burned.

When we opened the place up later in the day, you never saw such heaps of insects on the floors and in the corners of each bed! We swept them up dead into veritable pyramids.

And one more amateur fumigation job:

I had turned out to be such a famous exterminator that I got the nurses’ dormitory as my next job—but the heavy fumes trickled out under the main door there, cascaded down the stair and damn near suffocated the private patients in the rooms below.

Later in private practice in New Jersey, Williams attended deliveries in the homes of his patients and had more bed bug encounters of the hitch-hiking kind, and the need for decon routines:

When I’d go home, at three A.M. let’s say, I’d get into the dry bathtub, overcoat, shoes and all and undress by stages, dropping each garment on the floor outside the tub after I had inspected it. I’d find three or four riders each time I’d do it. One day in summer after I’d followed the ritual, the day after a delivery, I suddenly bethought myself of my straw hat. Pulling down the leather band inside, there she was! big as a lentil and as plump. I got out of the car, found some roadside dust an inch thick and put her to sleep in it.

These pages may be of related interest:

1. 1960, New Jersey, #4
2. Doomsday for Pests!
3. Systems of shame
4. Girault and the bed bugs
5. Johnson’s hut