17, 
times a whole carload of straw has been so affected that the use of 
it has been abandoned. In Springfield, Ohio, it is said that the dis- 
ease was so bad a year or two ago in the lowlands west of the city as 
seriously to hamper the progress of the construction of a large sewer; 
this, however, might have been due to attack by other mites. In 
Zanesville, Ohio, the potters have been obliged to abandon the use 
of straw and employ ‘‘prairie hay” for packing purposes. 
Doctor Schamberg was also informed by a physician of Pittsburg 
that a young woman patient had suffered from an affection closely 
resembling if not identical with the one under consideration each 
time that she had assisted in emptying cases of dishes packed in 
straw. Both the physician and the patient had come to believe that 
something in the straw was the cause of the eruption. 
Indeed, so nearly did the territory from which these complaints 
came to us coincide with that affected by the jointworm that it 
created the suspicion, not only among those engaged in the investiga- 
tions, but even among farmers themselves, that there must be some 
connection between the two phenomena. Very many of these cases 
were brought to the notice of practicing physicians, but the latter 
were at a loss to account for the prevalence of this dermatitis, many 
of them supposing it to be some species of rash that was more or less 
contagious, the exact nature of which they did not know. The lia- 
bility of confusion with other vastly more serious contagious diseases, 
notably smallpox, was of course very great. 
Among these physicians was Dr. Lyman T. Rawles, of Hunter- 
town, Ind., who, in May, 1909, undertook a careful study of a number 
of cases of this dermatitis that had come under his personal observa- 
tion, as well as those of some of his associates. Doctor Rawles’s inves- 
tigations were very carefully made, and the results are exceedingly 
valuable for the reason that, in the case of this western epidemic, he 
was able to trace the cause of the skin eruption to the mite (Pedicu- 
loides ventricosus) and follow this back to the host insect, the wheat 
jointworm (/sosoma tritict).* It clears up the obscurity surrounding 
the cause of this epidemic in the Middle West, a section throughout 
which the Angoumois grain moth never occurs in excessive abundance 
excepting in grain that is kept in store, and then only in the more 
southern portion of Indiana and Illinois. 
In May, 1909, Doctor Rawles found in his practice that a very 
strikingly strange skin disease presented itself in his own and the 
aQwing toan unfortunate misunderstanding, for which no one connected with these 
investigations is responsible, Doctor Rawles did not receive a proper determination 
of the mite involved in his studies of the dermatitis. The entomological nomencla- 
ture in his paper, printed in the Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association, 
August, 1909, should therefore be corrected by substituting Pediculoides ventricosus 
for Ditropinotus aureoviridis wherever the latter name occurs.—F’. M. W. 
[Cir. 118] 
