Louse Criticized

No one is really fond of lice. Last week the Lancet, British medical weekly, put in its two-pennyworth--a diatribe against the louse which rivaled Robert Burns's "ugly, creepin', blastit wonner, detested, shunn'd by saunt an' sinner."

"The louse may be the greatest of war's horrors," the editorial opened. "By the disgust that it produces, by the sleeplessness that results from it, by the ubiquity of the skin lesions, and by the mortal disease [typhus fever] that it carries in its bite, it surpasses any. Because it is unremitting, the soldier dreads it more than artillery fire. . . . From the slow crawl of the louse over his body there is no respite. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow it will go on. . . .

"Besides the body there is the mind. There are some to whom the idea of harboring a louse is so repellent as to unhinge the mind. . . . [Louse] control is perhaps the worst of all; for it depends upon inspections which ... are so undignified that no man would willingly submit to them, nor would any in his normal mind conduct them excepting as a duty."

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