Zbigniew Herbert, Feeder of Lice

 Talking of Zbigniew Herbert, I was startled to learn that, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, he worked as a 'feeder of lice' at the Rudolf Weigl Institute in Lvov. This was not a line of work I had ever heard of, so I decided to find out a bit more...
It seems that, at this time, the only way to develop a typhus vaccine was to feed typhus-infected lice with human blood, and the sated lice would then be used in the manufacture of vaccines. As the Nazis were desperate to have a mass vaccine to protect their army from typhus, they practised louse-feeding on a grand scale. The grisly procedure involved strapping small cages containing infected lice to the feeder's thigh or calf, and leaving them to drink their fill. Each cage contained 400 to 800 lice, feeding sessions were around 30 to 45 minutes, and they were repeated over the course of 12 days. A feeder would typically accommodate between seven and 11 boxes at a time. I'm feeling itchy already...  For the feeders there was of course a risk of infection, though they would have been given some kind of vaccine (and lice transmit typhus by way of their excrement rather than their bite). For those living under Nazi occupation, there were distinct and important advantages to being feeders of lice: they were given extra food rations, were permitted to move freely around the occupied city, and were exempt from being shipped to slave labour camps and Nazi concentration camps. For those reasons, many Polish intellectuals took up louse-feeding – including our man, Zbigniew Herbert. As far as I know, this experience did not find a way into his poems, but I may well be wrong – anyone?