J R Traver began to itch around her 40th birthday, and would continue to scratch away at her skin until her death some 40 years later. The zoologist was convinced that she and two other female relatives had been hosts to a skin parasite, a mite called Dermatophagoides scheremetewskyi. After 17 years of attempting to rid her body of the mites, the scientist even published a paper about her bodily infestation in the journal Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington, presumably in an effort to find someone who might help.
