Roasted cats and acid: 5 ways our ancestors tried to get rid of bedbugs

During the medieval and early modern periods, when vermin were believed to spontaneously generate from dirt, householders were advised to keep their bedrooms clean and well-ventilated.

Like many victims, the Scottish writer Jane Carlyle (1801–66) embarked on cleaning marathons whenever she found bedbugs in her own home. Once, after washing infested bedding, she drenched the kitchen floor with twenty pails of water “to drown any that might attempt to save themselves”. On another occasion, she found that her servant’s bed “was impregnated with them beyond even my cleansing powers”, and decided to throw it away.

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In the early 20th century, anti-bug strategies often focused on educating the poor. In 1930s Glasgow, a council scheme to instruct tenants in “the practice of household cleanliness” required them to wash their belongings with soap and water whilst under supervision. In New York, women who attended the home economics centres founded by Mabel Hyde Kittredge (1867–1955) were taught to scrub their bed frames weekly, whether or not they had an infestation.

Heat and cold… or buying a new house

Modern advice for dealing with infested bedding often includes lots of hot washes, or a few days in the freezer. Although they lacked such domestic appliances, our ancestors often used similar strategies.

The 18th-century cabinet-maker William Cauty recommended that “if you can spare your bedsteads for some weeks or months, commit them naked to the yard out-house,” adding that “excessive heat or excessive cold being the absolute cure of all vermin.” (He also suggested that in extreme circumstances, the best remedy was to buy a new house.)

Using fire or boiling water to kill your unwanted guests was not risk-free: in August 1760, an unfortunate London maidservant set fire to her master’s house whilst trying to destroy the bugs in her bed using a chafing dish of lighted charcoal.

Nevertheless, a 1934 report by the British Ministry of Health suggested that both steam disinfection and the application of heat using a blowlamp could be effective.

Preparation is key

Sometimes water was not enough, so many remedies involved the application of unpleasant substances to infected objects.

For example, the French encyclopaedist Noël Chomel (1632/3-1712) suggested an ointment made of roasted cat, which could be rubbed on the affected furniture.

Other preparations were made with highly toxic (and thus relatively effective) substances such as mercury. The American activist Lydia Child (1802-80) suggested filling cracks in the walls with arsenic-based paint; for wooden furniture she used a mixture of mercury and egg white, applied with a feather.

From the 18th century onwards, the market was flooded with patented remedies such as RIPA (sold in France c1900); this ‘King of Insecticides’ supposedly guaranteed a good night’s sleep. But many of these remedies worked only on contact, meaning that they would not kill every insect.

Extermination

From the 18th century onwards, professional exterminators became increasingly common. In the 1730s, the self-described ‘enterprizing Genius’ John Southall claimed that his special liquor (the recipe for which he had obtained from an elderly enslaved man in Jamaica) was uniquely effective in “bringing out and destroying Buggs”. It was available to purchase from his Southwark premises for two shillings a bottle. Alternatively, Southall and his staff would visit your house and carry out the treatment for you.

Other exterminators took a more unorthodox approach. In 1814, one Mr Tiffin (whose family had been in the business for over a century) went to work wearing “a cocked-hat and bag-wig”, and used a rapier to spear his victims. He claimed that his “scientific” method would kill every last bug.

Fumigation

Many pre-modern treatments for bedbugs involved fumigating the bedchamber with strong-smelling substances. The 18th-century physician Boyle Godfrey suggested burning sulphur over a charcoal stove, which would produce a “prodigiously strong Funck…such as will kill all Creatures in the Universe”. Across the Channel, Noël Chomel recommended burning cow-dung.

In the early 20th century, prussic acid was often used to fumigate infested dwellings. Public health authorities were particularly enthusiastic about its potential to prevent slum-dwellers carrying their infestations to newly built housing estates.

In 1930s Manchester, the council experimented with a double-pronged strategy: families were taken to cleaning stations (where they were bathed, and their clothes steam-cleaned), whilst their belongings were fumigated in the removal van.

These new chemicals were effective, but very dangerous. In March 1923, six members of the Kratzenburg family died after the restaurant beneath their Chicago apartment was fumigated. Twelve years later, two children died after a fumigation arranged by Aldershot council, because their bedding was not properly aired. Nevertheless, The Lancet argued that the gas was too effective a treatment for bedbugs to be discontinued.

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In the 1940s, the new insecticide DDT offered hope that bedbugs could be permanently eradicated, but it has ultimately proven to be both harmful to humans and increasingly ineffective.

Consequently, infestations are once again on the rise.

Find out more modern methods on how to get rid of bedbugs.

Katherine Harvey is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (Reaktion Books, 2021)