To paraphrase Jane Austen: It is a truth universally acknowledged that the news media will publish any claptrap as long as it is presented in the form of a list.



A few years back, the Orkin pest-control company acknowledged this universal truth and ginned up a public relations gimmick involving a list that has earned bountiful news coverage for the corporation and untold embarrassment for American cities including Cincinnati. Much to our continuing shame, Cincinnati has perennially ranked among Orkin’s annual list of the worst cities for bed bug infestation.

It was not so long ago, however, that Cincinnati was actually exporting our bed bugs for medical experimentation. The exporter was a naturalist named Charles Dury (1847-1931) who, in addition to shipping thousands of blood-sucking vermin abroad, was personally responsible for saving the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History.

Back in the early 1900s, pretty much anybody who had read a book or two earned the sobriquet “Professor,” Mr. Dury was somewhat more deserving of that title. Although largely self-taught, “Professor” Dury had published a lot of information concerning his studies in natural history, including more than 40 papers in the Journal of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History. Most of these papers featured his beloved beetles, but he also wrote about mammals and birds and, as early as 1886, delivered a lecture warning the scientific community that over-hunting and habitat destruction were sending many animal species on the road to extinction.

And Dury knew bed bugs. Intimately, one might say. Here is a squib Dury submitted to the magazine, Entomological News, for November 1906:

“In 1902 I bought a new willow rocking chair from a Cincinnati furniture dealer. It had arms made of plaited willow; whenever I sat in this chair, with shirt sleeves rolled up, my right arm, which rested on the chair arm, would be bitten and swollen. I soon came to the conclusion there was ‘something doing’ in the arm of the chair, so I laid it over a large sheet of paper and poured gasoline over it. Out of the arm of the chair I jarred 150 (actual count) fiendish ‘bed bugs.’ This was the same year I bought the chair. Since then, every summer, there have been bugs in that chair. I have poured boiling water over it, and drenched it with gasoline, but enough eggs have always escaped destruction to keep things going.”

As it happened, that brief note appeared during the very month that Dury was scouring Cincinnati for bed bugs, lots of bed bugs, more than 10,000 living bed bugs. According to the Cincinnati Post [17 November 1906]:

“For weeks Dury has been raiding bedrooms in the dirtiest tenement districts of Cincinnati. He has torn open old mattresses that looked likely. Many colonies of peaceful bed bugs were corralled, and finally enough secured to make a respectable Bugville army.”

But, why?

Because Walter Scott Patton needed bed bugs.

W.S. Patton, a captain in the British medical corps, was in Madras, India working on behalf of a Royal Society commission to prove his theory about a dreaded disease known in 1906 as Kala-azar or Black Fever, and now known as Leishmaniasis. The disease back then was almost always fatal, with death preceded by fever, weight loss, and swollen spleen and liver. It also presented as a skin disease with oozing ulcers all over the body. Nasty stuff. By the early 1900s, scientists knew an insect-borne parasite caused the disease, but no one knew which particular insect was responsible.

Patton bet it was bed bugs and needed additional specimens to conduct his research to prove that theory. Hence, Dury’s citywide collection of 10,000 Cincinnati bed bugs was wrapped up and pressed into medical service in Patton’s Indian laboratory.

The Cincinnati Post reporter had absolutely no concept of what Captain Patton and Professor Dury were up to. He apparently thought the bed bugs themselves were able to cure disease:

“This army of insects, numbering 10,000 or more, will engage in battle against the most dread disease known to the Eastern hemisphere, leprosy, bubonic plague, &c. For centuries the world’s greatest scientists have been trying to stop the spread of leprosy, with no success. Their cry for aid has reached Cincinnati after many centuries.”

Alas, Captain Patton was on the wrong trail. It was not bed bugs that spread Kala-azar; it was sand flies, a fact not proven until 1926. Apparently, no one thought to ask the native peoples of the affected areas, who had been exposing their children to sand fly bites for ages as a sort of vaccination.

Charles Dury was among the founders of the Cincinnati Society of Natural History and served as that organization’s president for the final 15 years of his life. Just months before he died, Dury helped arrange a beneficial influx of funds from the Cincinnatus Association to procure a suitable building for the society’s collections. That was a turning point in the history of the Museum of Natural History & Science now located at Union Terminal.

Dury Avenue in Avondale is named in honor of this bed bug exporter.