Book ID: CBB825215949

Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin (2021)

unapi

Sarasohn, Lisa Tunick (Author)


Johns Hopkins University Press


Publication Date: 2021
Physical Details: 296
Language: English

How vermin went from being part of everyone's life to a mark of disease, filth, and lower status.For most of our time on this planet, vermin were considered humanity's common inheritance. Fleas, lice, bedbugs, and rats were universal scourges, as pervasive as hunger or cold, at home in both palaces and hovels. But with the spread of microscopic close-ups of these creatures, the beginnings of sanitary standards, and the rising belief that cleanliness equaled class, vermin began to provide a way to scratch a different itch: the need to feel superior, and to justify the exploitation of those pronounced ethnically—and entomologically—inferior. In Getting Under Our Skin, Lisa T. Sarasohn tells the fascinating story of how vermin came to signify the individuals and classes that society impugns and ostracizes. How did these creatures go from annoyance to social stigma? And how did people thought verminous become considered almost a species of vermin themselves? Focusing on Great Britain and North America, Sarasohn explains how the label "vermin" makes dehumanization and violence possible. She describes how Cromwellians in Ireland and US cavalry on the American frontier both justified slaughter by warning "Nits grow into lice." Nazis not only labeled Jews as vermin, they used insecticides in the gas chambers to kill them during the Holocaust.Concentrating on the insects living in our bodies, clothes, and beds, Sarasohn also looks at rats and their social impact. Besides their powerful symbolic status in all cultures, rats' endurance challenges all human pretentions. From eighteenth-century London merchants anointing their carved bedsteads with roasted cat to repel bedbugs to modern-day hedge fund managers hoping neighbors won't notice exterminators in their penthouses, the studies in this book reveal that vermin continue to fuel our prejudices and threaten our status. Getting Under Our Skin will appeal to cultural historians, naturalists, and to anyone who has ever scratched—and then gazed in horror.

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Reviewed By

Review Mauro Mandrioli (2022) Review of "Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin". Nuncius: Annali di Storia della Scienza (pp. 744-746). unapi

Review Claire Turner (2022) Review of "Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 480-482). unapi

Review Claire Turner (2022) Review of "Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 480-482). unapi

Review Jeanne Robinson (2022) Review of "Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin". Archives of Natural History (pp. 436-437). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB825215949/

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Authors & Contributors
Iorio, Elena
Bramanti, Barbara
Overhoff, Jürgen
Stenseth, Nils Christian
Vaughan, Laura
Ward, Peter
Concepts
Science and society
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Public health
Human-animal relationships
Medicine
Popular culture
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
18th century
17th century
Places
North America
Italy
Europe
Great Britain
United States
Japan
Institutions
University of Oslo
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