Show Notes
In January of seventeen thirty-four, an Admiralty record noted that a state room aboard the Royal Navy yacht Charlotte had been painted green in an effort to discourage bedbugs. The record does not say whether the paint worked, but it preserves a quiet detail from a much longer history of people trying to make sleeping places comfortable again.
This episode follows bedbugs from archaeological remains at Tell el-Amarna in ancient Egypt to English recipe books, naval records, a Bristol spinning school, and a public health bulletin from nineteen sixteen. Its main focus is the period between about sixteen eighty and seventeen sixty, when householders, sailors, school communities, and professional exterminators recorded a growing range of attempts to manage these unwanted companions.
Some treatments involved plants, hot water, lavender, camphor, turpentine, paint, and substances now known to be hazardous. The surviving evidence tells us that people tried many things, but it rarely tells us which remedies worked, how often they were used, or how individuals felt about the problem. It also shows that bedbugs were not simply a sign of neglect. They moved with furniture, luggage, laundry, ships, and people.
This is a history of beds as valuable household objects, of shared rooms and cabins, of domestic knowledge passed through manuscripts and print, and of the limits of what old records can tell us about private sleep.
Learn more from the Forbidden Knowledge Network: https://FKNpods.com
This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication.
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YES OR NO: Did the history of bedbug control make you see old household recipe books differently? YES OR NO??????
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