266 SarCoptic Scabies 
so difficult of observation that their thorough investigation is a matter of 
great intrinsic difficulty. 
A revision of the subject is urgently needed, with the examination of 
fresh material, and a full knowledge of the results obtained hitherto. Such 
a revision will be greatly facilitated if the conclusions of previous workers 
are collated and presented in a compact form, and their chief discrepancies 
clearly indicated, and this is the immediate object of the present article. 
HISTORICAL. 
Real knowledge concerning the nature and cause of scabies dates from 
the 16th century. Numerous passages in the writings of the ancients seem 
to prove an acquaintance with the disease, which has no doubt afflicted man 
and domestic animals from time immemorial, but until the various skin 
diseases were discriminated and the parasites to which some of them are 
attributable had been discovered and studied, such allusions were bound to 
be vague and unsatisfactory. 
Scaliger (1557) is the first writer to show an exact knowledge of the 
subject. He describes how the parasite “lodges under the epidermis and 
burns by the galleries it burrows.” Ambroise Pare (1564) explains how the 
mites can be extracted by the aid of a needle. Aldrovandus (1596) gives 
an unmistakeable account of the disease, so that it is clear that much accurate 
information on the matter existed by the end of the 16th century. 
Further progress was made during the 17th century. The Englishman 
Thomas Moffett (or Muffet, Moufet, Moufetius) (1634) states that the mites 
do not inhabit the pustules but are to be found near-by—an observation 
which would have saved much trouble if subsequent investigators had borne 
it in mind—and Hauptmann (1657), in a work on the Waters of Wolkenstein, 
gave for the first time a (very inaccurate) figure of the parasite. 
Then Bonomo 1 (perhaps a pseudonym for Cestoni), in a letter to Redi 
written in 1687, treated the subject in a manner remarkable for its admixture 
of truth and error, and his figure held the field till the middle of the next 
century as the classical representation of the sarcopt, being given a new lease 
of life by its use by Mead in Philosophical Transactions for 1702. So the 
matter rested till the advent of Linnaeus, who gave a good account of the 
mite and its habits, though he vacillated with regard to its name and syste¬ 
matic position, calling it Acarus liumanus subcutaneous (1734) and Acarus 
scabiei with a doubtfully distinct form Acarus exulcerans parasitic on animals 
(1758), but to the end confusing it with the flour-mite Tyroglyphus. 
The first thorough-going study of the mite as the exclusive cause of 
scabies is that of De Geer (1778), and in 1786 the Hanoverian physician 
1 The letter to Redi was signed Giovan. Cosimo Bonomo. Delafond and Bourguignon (p. 89) 
say roundly that Cestoni wrote to Redi under this pseudonym, and their contemporaries were of 
the same opinion. There was, however, a Dr Cosimo Bonomo who was a pupil of and a colla¬ 
borator with Cestoni. The matter is fully discussed in Fiirstenberg, p. 13 et seq. 
