A seventy-year-old woman was supposed to see us on a Thursday afternoon. She was coming a great distance from a nursing home and our staff had been told she had had a rash over her entire body for the two years she had been in that home. They felt it was a drug eruption and hoped we could help.

The patient failed to show for her appointment, but the following Monday morning we were called to see her in the hospital. She had been brought by ambulance four days before for emergency surgery in the middle of the night, engendered by a blood clot in her left leg.

On examination we saw a woman clawing her inflamed red scaly skin, complaining of a terrible itch: “I've had it for years. Do something!” Between her fingers we saw tiny blisters, and on her fingers there were several thread-like burrows. She had scabies, the highly contagious “seven year itch.” We proved it by finding the Acarus scabiei itch mite on scrapings. Yes, we found out that she did not have a drug rash, but scabies. And as soon as we learned it, so did the ambulance driver and his two assistants, six nurses in the emergency room, and another nine floor nurses, as well as the vascular surgeon and three of his operating room nurses. All twenty-two were now itching, because they caught scabies from their contact with her.