Those Disturbers of My Rest: The First Treatise on Bedbugs (1730)

He starts to breed bedbugs, admiring them under microscopes. “A Bugg’s Body is shaped and shelled, and the Shell as transparent and finely striped as the most beautiful amphibious Turtle”. For eighteen months, Southall mates a new pair of bugs every fortnight, recording their reactions to various foods. “Their beloved Foods are Blood, dry’d Paste, Size, Deal, Beach, Osier, and some other Woods, the Sap of which they suck”. They don’t care for oak, walnut, cedar, or mahogany. In temperament, bedbugs are “watchful and cunning”, “timorous of us”, but when fighting each other, they war “as eagerly as Dogs or Cocks”, waging internecine battles where both parties “have died on the Spot”. He becomes intimate with their sexual habits. “They are hot in Nature, generate often, and shoot their Spawn all at once, and then leave it”. And he uses their bites as a heuristic of his personal health: “I daily am bit when practicing and at work in my Business, destroying them; and as they never swell me but when out of order, from thence I infer, that not only myself, but all such who are among Buggs, and do not swell with their Bites, are certainly in good Habit of Body.” One section of Southall’s bugbook approaches something like nature writing as he attends to the shifting colors of his developing subjects.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/mslOG4A