173 
BODY-LICE UNDER SUMMER CONDITIONS IN 
MESOPOTAMIA. 
By P. A. BUXTON, M.A., M.R.C.S. 
(Fellow of Trinity College , Cambridge.) 
During the summer months in Mesopotamia body-lice become extremely 
scarce on man, so much so that it may be difficult to find them even on men 
who are renowned for lousiness at other seasons of the year. When the nights 
become cold, as they often do rather suddenly towards the end of November, 
lice rapidly become numerous, this coinciding with the reissue of winter 
under-linen which has been stored through the summer in Ordnance dumps. 
During my service as Entomologist to the Mesopotamian Force I con¬ 
stantly encountered officers, specialists in sanitation among them, who 
erroneously supposed that the lice survived the unfavourable conditions in 
summer as eggs in the stored warm clothing, the Ordnance being in fact 
blamed for distributing verminous clothing to various highly respectable units 
who would otherwise, as I was assured, not have suffered from these pests. 
I always pointed out that this was impossible in view of what we know of 
the duration of the egg and other stages of this insect, but as superstitions 
die hard it may be as well to record that during the summer of 1919, in the 
Persian plateau, which enjoys a summer as dry as that of Mesopotamia and 
only a little cooler, I could always find body-lice on 5 per cent, or 10 per cent, 
of Indian troops, even in one excellent unit the men of which were inspected 
by their own officers every week. In these dry hot summers lice appear to 
survive with difficulty and to breed very slightly. On the men in question 
I rarely found more than one or at the most two lice and this explains why 
their own officers failed to find them. 
The Mesopotamian summer, which appears so unfavourable to repro¬ 
duction, is generally very dry. Maximum shade temperatures pass 120° F. 
once or twice every summer, and pass 105° F. most days in the four summer 
months. Under active service conditions men were habitually exposed to 
higher temperatures than these official ones. In N.W. Persia, at Qazvin, 
