A Treatise of Buggs

What would drive a man to write an entire book about bedbugs? In 1730, John Southall had an answer: infestation, desperation, and an unlikely voyage to Jamaica in search of salvation. This strange, intimate treatise documents one man's descent into bedbug madness and his emergence as an unlikely entomological pioneer. Southall combines meticulous observation of these bloodsuckers' breeding habits and biology with a remarkable personal narrative about traveling to the Caribbean to learn a potent liquor formula from a local man who claimed to have conquered the pests entirely. The result is something between a natural history, a self-help manual, and a confession. Southall debunks the era's absurd theories about bedbug origins while offering practical, winter-focused strategies for eradication. Three centuries later, the book remains strangely comforting in its specificity: someone cared enough about these creatures to track them, study them, and hunt them across an ocean.