I am most familiar with fleas. Fleas, of course, transmit the bacteria that cause plague. The Black Death, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, was likely carried along the Silk Road by rat fleas that jumped aboard merchant vessels, continuing to wreak havoc, eventually killing up to 60% of the European population. While doctors can now treat the plague with antibiotics, it is still a public health risk. In July 2017, the New York Times reported on the recurrence of plague in New Mexico, and on October 1, 2017, the World Health Organization announced that it was responding to a large outbreak of the plague in Madagascar.
However, as a historian of colonial America and the early United States, I mostly think about fleas as ever-present and frequently-commented-upon pests. As I listened to the story about the extinction of parasites, the ghost of Martha Ballard appeared to me. She told me that after she aided in the delivery of her neighbor’s twins that she “could not sleep for fleas.” When she got home, she removed the fleas from her clothing, and, apparently, counted them, finding 80.
Parasites are itchy and troublesome. Seventeenth-century paintings sometimes featured nit- or flea-picking. As Katherine Ashenburg wrote in The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History, paintings like this one, Woman Catching a Flea, by Georges de la Tour, reflected “a familiar theme in seventeenth-century painting, and no wonder, for children and adults, from the most privileged to the poorest, teemed with lice, nits and fleas.”
Parasites — or at least the clothes that harbored them — were, of course, tied to cultural perceptions and practices during the centuries of European empire-building in the Americas. While Columbus’s sailors were afflicted with typhus spread by body lice, the Tainos they encountered may not have been. Diego Alvarez Chanca, who accompanied Columbus on his 1493 voyage remarked on the Tainos’ lack of clothing: “All these people, as I have said, go about as they were born, except the women of this island who keep their shameful parts covered, with cotton cloth …, the heads shaved in parts with such a variety of tufts, that they cannot be described.”