Feeder of lice

A feeder of lice was a job in interwar and Nazi-occupied Poland, in the city of Lwów at the Institute for Study of Typhus and Virology of Rudolf Weigl (Polish: Instytut Badań nad Tyfusem Plamistym i Wirusami prof. Rudolfa Weigla) in Lwów (Lviv, Ukraine). It involved serving as a source of blood for lice, a typhus vector, which could then be used to develop vaccines against the disease.

Initially begun in 1920 by Weigl, during the Nazi occupation of the city it became the primary means of support and protection for many of the city's Polish intellectuals, including the mathematician Stefan Banach and the poet Zbigniew Herbert. While the profession carried a significant risk of infection, thanks to Weigl's patronage the feeders of lice obtained additional food rations, were protected from being shipped to slave labor in Germany or German concentration camps, and were allowed additional mobility around the occupied city.

Typhus research involving human subjects, who were purposely infected with the disease, was also carried out in various Nazi concentration camps, in particular at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen and to a lesser extent at Auschwitz.

French bacteriologist Charles Nicolle showed in 1909 that lice (Pediculus humanus corporis) were the primary means by which the typhus bacteria (Rickettsia prowazekii) were spread. In his experiments Nicolle infected a chimpanzee with typhus, retrieved the lice from it, and placed them on a healthy chimpanzee who developed the disease shortly thereafter. Further work established that it was lice excrement rather than bites which spread the disease. Nicolle received a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work on typhus in 1928.

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