Mud, mange and lice

A few days ago I was in contact with a local historian from the Yorkshire village where I was born. He is researching a booklet about the men of the village who served in the First World War and was seeking information about Arthur Fisher, my great uncle. In the extra, a family photograph taken in 1912, Arthur is standing in the middle of the back row. 

I was able to tell him that I vividly remember Arthur's sister Mary talking about a time when he came home on leave filthy with Flanders mud, mangey and lousy. She stood him in a tin bath at the top of the cellar steps and scrubbed him clean!

Mud, lice and sarcoptic mange mites were constant, unwanted companions of the soldiers in the field. The main photograph shows the ventral and dorsal surfaces of a fine model of the mite Sarcoptes scabiei the cause of sarcoptic mange. The model, made by the French company Deyrolle is made of coloured wax and is quite exquisite in terms of detail and represents the very best of the models made in the early 20th century. The real mite, which is less than half a millimetre in size, is a serious skin parasite of man and other mammals causing the condition known as sarcoptic mange. The adults breed on the surface of the skin and once fertilised the female starts to excavate a burrow through the horny layer of the skin at a rate of 2 - 3 mm a day. Whilst burrowing the female mite lays her eggs and leaves faecal deposits as she goes. Once the eggs hatch into larvae they burrow to the surface of the skin where they travel around the  body feeding. A new generation of mites will be produced every three weeks. The mite's activity causes the skin to react and this intense pruritus causes the afflicted to scratch constantly, self inflicting open wounds and secondary bacterial infection often follows. All the scratching and biting opens the burrow and once the female mite is exposed she dies. The eggs and faecal debris left behind continue to cause pruritus which in turn causes more self mutilation, more females to die, more pruritus, more self mutilation and so on.