Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin by Lisa T. Sarasohn (review)

Abstract

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• Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin by Lisa T. Sarasohn
• Michelle Webb

Lisa T. Sarasohn. Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. xii + 280 pp. Ill. $30.00 (978-1-4214-4138-2).

There are not many historical monographs that combine subject matter as diverse as Thomas Becket's mortification of his flesh, Charles Darwin's theories about lice, and Donald Trump's insults toward Bernie Sanders. Lisa T. Sarasohn's latest work covers all of this ground and more, encompassing everything from Christina of Sweden shooting fleas from a tiny cannon to the atrocities of the Holocaust. The unifying theme here is vermin, the despised creatures that have historically infested bodies and homes. But this work addresses not just responses to the bites, foul odors, and diseases that these creatures have inflicted upon humanity. Instead Sarasohn has produced a compelling and convincing account of how those who wish to denigrate their enemies have customarily accused them of either hosting and spreading vermin, or of actually being vermin. This is a history of rats and fleas and of prophylactic ointments made from roasted cats, but it is also a history of gas chambers made to resemble delousing showers. It is the history of othering, of racism and xenophobia, of class-based prejudice, and of the fear of the filthy other.

Sarasohn has ordered her huge range of material within a strict taxonomical and chronological framework. Bedbugs, fleas, lice, and rats are assigned two chapters each, one concentrating upon the premodern period, the other upon the modern world. Each section would be entirely comprehensible if read in isolation, but the cumulative effect is impressive and reveals the extent to which this apparently niche area of scholarship is nothing of the sort. In addition to being able to trace the development of a particularly pernicious strain of dehumanization, this book also enables the reader to gain insight into both changing views of the human body and changing expectations of what that body should be expected to endure. By drawing attention to such areas as early modern acceptance of bedbug bites (only their smell was believed intolerable), Sarasohn traces how and when being infested became both personally and socially unacceptable. The increasing assumption among at least part of the population that it should be possible to be physically comfortable at will is made visible here, and I would argue that this is part of the history of how the elite withdrew or attempted to withdraw from popular culture, in this case that culture being expressed primarily through itching.

Getting Under Our Skin is based upon extensive familiarity with the relevant historiography, and the text is meticulously annotated. It also utilizes a prodigious number of primary sources, many of them personally authored accounts of interactions with vermin or with individuals classified as vermin. A range of literary and visual sources are also put to good use. Everyone from Charles I to Fox News is here, merrily dehumanizing their enemies through the rhetoric of [End Page 641] infestation. We learn about Samuel Pepys, who found bedbugs funny but objected to lice, and Beatrix Potter, whose fondness for animals encompassed rats but not bedbugs. Familiar works by John Donne and William Blake are accompanied by lesser-known contributions to the literature of vermin, such as poet Isaac Rosenberg's account of the lice-ridden trenches of World War I. The visual sources reproduced in the text range from the well-known images of fleas and lice as seen through early microscopes in Robert Hooke's Micrographia, which Sarasohn credits with initially sparking her interest in this subject, to an alarmingly cheerful 1940s advertisement for DDT-infused nursery wallpaper. All human life is here, and much of it is busy scratching.

In this work Sarasohn has taken a seemingly peripheral area of subject matter and convincingly argued for its centrality to European and North American culture. The history of being bitten might initially appear inconsequential, but the history of dehumanization is anything but. Few readers of Getting Under Our Skin will ever skip over the word "lousy" in a primary...