How did they do it? The numbers of bed bug infestations fell significantly in the inter-war years in Britain. Well before DDT. The answer, it turns out, is in the wholesale reorganization of housing for the poor.
Grievously for us, I believe, the slum clearance and rehousing movement of the 1930s exploited and perpetuated the stigma of bed bugs. Can I share with you this depressing and disturbing history?
First up, the medico-moral vanguardist Dr. Millard.
“That unsavoury feature of slum life”
It is July 14, 1932 and two hundred doctors have heard presentations on unventilated offices and milk pasteurization. But the subject of Dr. C. Killick Millard’s presidential address to the Society of Medical Officers of Health is bed bugs.
It is not a subject for polite company. Notice, too, that the single word bug, always and exclusively meaning bed bugs in the literature of this period, is used almost throughout.
Millard fears that “the extent of the evil is probably not realised”:
I fancy there are many people who flatter themselves that theirs is a “clean” town, who would have rather a shock if they looked closely behind the loose wallpaper in most of the old houses in their poorer districts!
With such disgust—not to say loathing—are bugs regarded by the well-to-do classes that it is considered bad form even to mention the word in polite society; but at a meeting such as this no apology is needed for dwelling upon the subject in some detail.
Millard, C. Killick. 1932. Presidential Address, on An Unsavoury but Important Feature of the Slum Problem. The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health 53, no. 7: 365-372. doi:10.1177/146642403205300705
Millard appears ready to assert that bed bugs are a public health pest and, moreover, render homes “unfit for human habitation.” However, if one is at first inclined to like Millard, “the enlightened Medical Officer of Health for Leicester” in the words of a contemporary, his ambivalent thoughts on the causes and features of bed bug infestations soon give pause to any budding sympathy:
It is certainly not fair to put all the blame for the presence of bugs in a house upon the tenant. No doubt the tenant has his responsibility in the matter, and the tenants of bug-infested houses are not usually the cleanest of people; but often they are to be pitied as much as blamed. They will tell you, and in many cases I dare say truthfully, that there were bugs in the house when they first went into it; that they have been at no end of trouble trying to get rid of them; that they have got up in the night to search for them; that they have spent a lot of money in buying “stuff” with which to exterminate them; but that, whilst they may get rid of them for a time, they always come back again, especially in warm weather.
The fact is that effective disinfestation of an old house in the slums is a most difficult matter, even for a health department with all its resources; still less is it easy for the tenant without those resources. The bug is a most hardy insect, and the chances of survival are largely in its favour.
The bug-infested house is part of the slum problem, and we shall not solve the slum problem merely by putting the blame on the slum-dweller.
So which is it, Dr. Millard? The near impossibility of eradication or bed bugs and filth again?
One may find bugs in a clean house occupied by clean people, and conversely there may be no bugs in a dirty house. But, speaking generally, a really clean housewife will not tolerate either dirt or bugs.
It occurs to me, knowing what we know now about the distribution of bed bugs in society when the infestation rate is high (well, like ours), that this exception for the “really clean housewife” is obligatory. That audience of medical health officers may have known bed bugs more intimately than they would have cared to admit.
It becomes necessary then to draw distinctions.
For the conditions that favor bed bug infestations according to Millard are:
1. Old houses in which there are many good hiding-places for bugs.
2. Proximity to other bug-infested houses; bugs may spread from one house to another.
3. Overcrowding. Often the bedsteads and cots are so closely together than the difficulty in searching out bugs is greatly increased.
4. Lack of facilities, e.g. absence of gas or electric light in bedrooms, which increases the difficulty of searching at night time when the bugs come out.
5. Lastly—and this, of course, is a most important factor—lack of determination on the part of the tenants to exterminate this pest, no matter how great the trouble involved.
Lack of determination? Bed bugs as personal failure. We will see this again.
And yet, as Millard describes the methods of eradication then in use, fumigation by hydrogen cyanide, ethylene oxide, sulphur dioxide, and formaldehyde, I want to note his mention of “liquid vermifuges”:
They all have their advocates, but the price of many of them seems quite unnecessarily high. Possibly a recipe given in Cummings’s brochure, consisting of an emulsion of paraffin, soft soap and water, is as efficacious as most other liquid vermifuges, and it has the advantage of being very cheap. Most liquids sold or used as vermifuges are efficacious provided you can spray the liquid direct on to the insects, but the difficulty is to do this. There is always the probability that a few bugs or eggs will escape destruction and cause the trouble to reappear.
That does sound difficult, doctor.
“The bug is the enemy of man”
If bed bugs are abominable, nearly impossible to control, and yet people living in slums are somehow themselves partly to blame, the solution, then, is a campaign of shame:
It must be remembered, however, before we judge others too harshly, that many of the class we are considering have been accustomed to the presence of bugs, more or less, all their lives, and familiarity has therefore bred indifference. Part of a complete campaign against the bed-bug must be to organise propaganda with a view to arousing an “anti-bug conscience.” I believe that if this were done, equally good results could be achieved as has been the case, in some cities at any rate, with pediculus capitis or the head louse. In Leicester, before the days of medical inspection of school children and of young factory entrants, head lice were so common that only a minority of girls had really clean heads. To-day I think I may say that it is the exception to find a dirty head. It has come to be looked upon as somewhat of a disgrace for a girl to have “things in her hair.”
[Emphasis added]
Before we judge others too harshly?
This is the goal, to look upon bed bugs as a disgrace. And I think we’ll find that their project entirely succeeded.
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