Ringworm: A disease of schools and mass schooling in the UK

The chapter frames ringworm as a disease of schools and schoolchildren in United Kingdom. The disease had been reported previously in orphanages and similar institutions, but its incidence and profile increased with the arrival of mass schooling, which provided ideal conditions for its spread, both through increased opportunities for contagion (seeding) and the exposure of poor children (weakened soil). Responses to the problem included special schools for the isolation and treatment of sufferers. These became sites for the use of the new x-ray technologies, not to kill the seeds of infection, but to alter the soil by removing hair, the locus of infection.