THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



It is true that here and there a physician had claimed 

 to find an insect lodged in the skin of a sufferer from 

 itch, and two or three times the claim had been made 

 that this was the cause of the malady, but such views 

 were quite ignored by the general profession, and in 

 1833 it was stated in an authoritative medical treatise 

 that the "cause of gale is absolutely unknown." But 

 even at this time, as it curiously happened, there were 

 certain ignorant laymen who had attained to a bit of 

 medical knowledge that was withheld from the inner 

 circles of the profession. As the peasantry of England 

 before Jenner had known of the curative value of cow- 

 pox over small-pox, so the peasant women of Poland 

 had learned that the annoying skin disease from which 

 they suffered was caused by an almost invisible insect, 

 and, furthermore, had acquired the trick of dislodging 

 the pestiferous little creature with the point of a needle. 

 From them a youth of the country, F. Renucci by 

 name, learned the open secret. He conveyed it to Paris 

 when he went there to study medicine, and in 1S3 

 demonstrated it to his master, Alibert. This physician, 

 at first sceptical, soon was convinced, and gave out the 

 discovery to the medical world with an authority that 

 led to early acceptance. 



Now the importance of all this, in the present con- 

 nection, is not at all that it gave the clew to the method 

 of cure of a single disease. What makes the discovery 

 epochal is the fact that it dropped a brand-new idea 

 into the medical ranks an idea destined, in the long- 

 run, to prove itself a veritable bomb the idea, namely, 

 that a minute and quite unsuspected animal parasite 

 may be the cause of a well-known, widely prevalent, 

 and important human disease. Of course the full force 



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