Lice have been intimately associated with human society throughout history. In the Middle Ages, they were essentially ubiquitous. At the death of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170, it was recorded that "The vermin boiled over like water in a simmering cauldron, and the onlookers burst into alternate weeping and laughing". The clergy often saw lice and other parasites as a constant reminder of human frailty and weakness. Monks and nuns would purposely ignore grooming themselves and suffer from infestations to express their religious devotion. A mediaeval treatment for lice was an ointment made from pork grease, incense, lead, and aloe.
Robert Hooke's 1667 book, Micrographia: or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and Inquiries thereupon, illustrated a human louse, drawn as seen down an early microscope.
Margaret Cavendish's satirical The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1668) has "Lice-men" as "mathematicians", investigating nature by trying to weigh the air like the real scientist Robert Boyle.
In 1935 the Harvard medical researcher Hans Zinsser wrote the book Rats, Lice and History, alleging that both body and head lice transmit typhus between humans. Despite this, the modern view is that only the body louse can transmit the disease.
Soldiers in the trenches of the First World War suffered severely from lice, and the typhus they carried. The Germans boasted that they had lice under effective control, but themselves suffered badly from lice in the Second World War on the Eastern Front, especially in the Battle of Stalingrad. "Delousing" became a euphemism for the extermination of Jews in concentration camps such as Auschwitz under the Nazi regime.
In the psychiatric disorder delusional parasitosis, patients express a persistent irrational fear of animals such as lice and mites, imagining that they are continually infested and complaining of itching, with "an unshakable false belief that live organisms are present in the skin".
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