Man's Mortal Enemies 11 



through the rubble of bombed-out cities, lice move in to feed 

 on the anemic blood of the unhappy individuals. 



Since typhus is transmitted by lice, it is easy to under- 

 stand why waves of typhus have devastated Europe and Asia 

 for hundreds of years. The first bath tub was introduced in 

 to America in about 1840, and for years thereafter many 

 prominent medical men of the day wrote learned tracts and 

 made impassioned speeches about the dangers of bathing. 

 The Saturday-night bath did not become an American tradi- 

 tion until many years later, and even then many reactionaries 

 continued to resist this revolutionary idea. Imagine what 

 conditions must have been like in Europe in, say, the 15 th, 

 l6th, or 17th century? Praaically no one bathed, and 

 everyone, from the poorest peasant in his filthy rags to the 

 proudest queen with her equally filthy petticoats, was infested 

 with crawling, biting vermin. 



Typhus is one of the numerous fever-producing diseases 

 caused by germs that are intermediate in size between the 

 bacteria and the filterable viruses. This class of organisms 

 is called the Rickettsiae, after their discoverer, Howard Tay- 

 lor Ricketts, an American who, ironically, contracted typhus 

 and died in 1910 in Mexico City while he was studying 

 tabardillo, the Mexican form of the disease. 



Because the symptoms of typhus are similar to those of 

 a number of related diseases, it is impossible for the medical 

 historian to estimate when typhus first began to change the 

 history of the world. Many of the epidemics described by 

 early writers might have been typhus, but the evidence is too 

 incomplete for a proper diagnosis. We do know, however, 

 that typhus broke out among the army of Ferdinand and Isa- 

 bella during the siege of Granada in 1489-1490, and that 

 17,000 soldiers are supposed to have lost their lives from 



