Re: Twisted Nematode Trapping Fungus Threads

It wasn't easy for me dedicate 1/4 slice raw bacon to this experiment. I buy the good stuff and don't like wasting it on skin experiments. But a couple of modern day posts about bacon therapy, and then rereading C.E. Kelletts' publication that researched the Morgellons of the 15th-18th centuries, convinced me to try it:

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/letter/kellett.html

In 1558²⁰ he published a book "Halosis febrium" the third part of which deals with "De infantium febris. . . ." and contains the following account of this condition, which Still²¹ has translated as follows: It is rather remarkable that he, an inhabitant of Languedoc, should have been content with but a second hand report of this malady, which he regards as "A new affection of infants," but which he was not the first, as we have already seen, to describe.

There is also another infantile affection, as a result of which children constantly cry and scream without apparent cause: epilepsy eventually supervenes in these cases, and in a large proportion ends in death. The common name for this is "the hair affection" (pilaris affectio); for this reason that by the protrusion and evulsion of hairs some cases are saved: and after this manner: the shoulders and neck are rubbed with the hand either dry or smeared from the milk pail, i.e. with milk still warm from the milking-pail; the parts which are rubbed soon become rough with hairs which are clearly seen springing out like a growing beard. Then by means of bacon rind rubbed over the hairs or by a forceps every single hair is plucked out and forthwith they are cured. So I gathered from the account of a certain noble matron, who stated that in the year 1544 she saw several infants who died of this illness, and some who were saved by the aforementioned treatment. Very closely analogous to this is what is said to be the case in pigs, for Didymus says that they are known to be out of health by hairs plucked out of the neck; and if their tonsils are diseased, they are cured by the plucking out of these same hairs.

The above-mentioned affection, so far as I can judge, is a fore-runner of epilepsy, where this is not a primary cerebral disturbance nor of reflex gastric origin (sympathia ventriculi) but by reflex from some posterior part in relation to the back. The so-to-speak sooty excretion (which is the material out of which hairs are formed) pass thence via the nervous structures right up to the brain, unless it is forced back by rubbings, and issuing forth through the pores of the skin which have been rendered more permeable by dry friction, is turned into hairs. Hence it is not difficult to see that rubbings without oily material, which blocks the pores, would be the more helpful.

The mention of a pig condition is interesting too, since researchers today are drawing parallells between bovine digital dermititis and Morgellons-  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257881/ 

Excuse the bacon derail in your Nematophaguous Fungi thread.