Medicine: Bedbug Hunters

Socrates: Here, Strepsiades, bring me a bed.

Strepsiades: But I can’t. The bedbugs won’t let me.

-Aristophanes, Clouds

Athens is still so buggy that angry visitors with a learned background call it Koreopolis (bedbug city). The Balkans and the Near East are miserably infested. The populace is too ignorant or indolent to kill off the pests with insecticide.

Last week one who has been vexed by Athenian bedbug pricks, Dr. N. T. Lorando, chief physician of the Evangelismos Hospital and Near East Relief at Athens, published in Scientific Monthly a learned treatise on bedbugs and biological bedbug hunters.

In the U. S., Dr. Lorando’s research reveals, red house ants attack bedbugs, dismember them, carry off body fragments to their nests. Florida peasants advocate introducing the ants artificially to homes.

Cockroaches are also voracious bedbug hunters so. in some places, is the kissing or assassin bug.

But the insect of choice, in Dr. Lorando’s experience is Thanatos flavidus Simon, a spider. Bedbugs will run from an irate human, but they apparently have no fear of Thanatos flavidus Simon. He catches the bugs by their backs and sucks out their blood and juices until only a shell remains. So efficacious is Thanatos flavidus Simon that he thoroughly cleaned an Athenian suburb where bedbugs were so thick that householders were obliged to sweep them off the floors and sidewalks. Dr. Lorando reports that the spider is not poisonous to humans, is less objectionable about the house than are ants, cockroaches or kissing bugs.