The word "parasite" comes from the Greek word "parasitos", meaning "beside food". They were reffering to the people who served food to nobles or ammused nobles in order to gain a favor or get a few scraps of food when they came up with this. These people leached off of other people, or lived off of other people. Sound formiliar? The Greeks also looked at parasites in terms of biology as well. As a matter of fact, Aristotle saw things that lived on on a pig's tounge. But basically every culture knew about parasites in one way or another and they had their own plants and treatments to get rid of them and guidelines to help ward off the beasts. We may not realize it, but many of the stories we heard as children may actually be caused by parasites. Guinea worms may be those "firey snakes" that plagued Israelites in the Bible. The worms were frequent in the place he traveled. They travel up the leg and do make a person feel like flames are licking their skin, caused by the immunes responce to the worms. The only way to remove these worms is to slowly wind them up on a stick. Think about it- Stick and "firey surpants". This procedure may have given birth to the modern day medical symbol, two snakes winding themselves around a stick.
Durring the Resaissance, European doctors didn't really think parasites caused illness. They thought that diseases caused the body to go out of wack or they were sick because of the heat or the cold. They thought that malaria was caused by breathing in bad air. They also belived that a diseased body produced it's own parasite, not the other way around. They thought that since parasites were living things, they MUST be produced by the body. Scientists thought that they were spontaniously generated in the blood.
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