Kenneth Mellanby Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) (1908–1993). The facts about scabies

Abstract

Kenneth Mellanby was a distinguished biologist specialising in entomology. He helped to establish the first university in Nigeria and undertook pioneering work on the use of insecticides in agriculture. However, he will best be remembered for a series of experiments which he undertook on human volunteers during the Second World War. These experiments established the mechanism of transmission of scabies and allowed its effective control at a time when the condition had reached epidemic proportions, causing a significant adverse effect on public morale and military effectiveness. Mellanby’s wartime monograph on scabies remains to this day the definitive work on the disease and is still studied by dermatologists. His subsequent book Human Guinea Pigs is a remarkable account of the privations to which wartime volunteers willingly submitted themselves in a way that would have never passed any current medical ethics committee.