".... One of the curators at the Natural History Museum responsible for lice was Bruce Frederic Cummings, who joined the staff in January 1912. He had – too grim for irony – a lousy time. He was dying from multiple sclerosis, what was then known as disseminated sclerosis. He was forced to resign from the Museum in 1917 because of ill health. But he recorded his struggle with decline in a remarkable memoir compiled from his diaries. His extraordinary account was published in March 1919 under the title The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Cummings wrote under the nom de plume of W. N. P. Barbellion. The initials W. N. P. stood for Wilhelm Nero Pilate, the author's selection of the most despicable people in history; Wilhelm was of course Kaiser Bill, this being the time of the First World War. Barbellion was a name emblazoned above a shop in South Kensington that Cummings passed every day. The Journal is a work of introspection so intense and unflinching that it leaves the reader exhausted. There is fury at his loss of hope, but since Barbellion was incapable of turning a dull phrase the text is also somewhat exhilarating. Of his wasting disease he writes: 'Why this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for the imprudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing... I am not offering up my life willingly – it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the pilfering with lamentable eyes' (5 July 1917).

    Several distinguished writers viewed his work with favor. H. G. Wells wrote the introduction to the Journal, and Marcel Proust and James Joyce were admirers. Other critics thought the work immoral and self-indulgent. The Journal is a hodge-podge of stories, health reports and observations on decline, which are riddled with guilt and illuminated by ecstatic flashes. It is impossible not to feel sympathy for this hypersensitive soul in perpetual torment. His time in the Natural History Museum was not in any sense a happy one. He was clearly devoted to zoology, and returns to this infatuation with regularity of a mantra. He taught himself comparative anatomy from specimens borrowed from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. He desperately wanted to be a professional natural historian. 'In the repost of the spacious laboratory by the sea, or in the halls of some great Museum, life with its vulgar struggles, its hustle and obscenity, scarcely penetrates. Behind these doors life flows slowly, deeply' (4 March 1911) He wanted to know everything, to suck in the whole of nature, but was awestruck by the limitations of his memory and his persistence. He equally wanted to experience the life inside every pub and on every street corner – and women: he had an unquenchable voracity for experience, even as his health dictated a contraction into neurasthenia and introspection. He certainly did not wish to be any kind of functionary in the natural history world. 'I don't want to be worrying my head over remedies for potato disease, or cures for fleas in fowls. Heaven preserve me from becoming a County Council lecturer or a Government Entomologist' (30 June 1911). The latter is exactly what he became. He yearned to be a great comparative anatomist, the Richard Owen of his day. Instead, he was destined to write pamphlets on lice, even as his serving contemporaries suffered from their unwelcome attentions in the trenches – an ordeal he was to unwell to share. He felt he was intended for nobler things. 'I gave evidence as an expert [his italics] in Economic Entomology at the County Court in a case concerning damage to furniture by mites for which I am paid £8–8s fee and expense and travelled first class. What irony!' (8 October, 1913). There is something of distain for the commercial creature in his attitude. He wanted to fly nobly above the commonplace, to be admirable and remarkable and justly famous. He excoriated himself for failing to achieve his dreams, and yet how realistically he knew that they were just dreams. He was in many respects a thoroughly modern antihero. He wanted to know all of zoology, yet found that reading even one number of the German scientific journal Zoologische Anzeger cover to cover beyond him. 'Zoology alone was sufficient to baulk my puny endeavours,' he wrote in 1913. 'How hopeless it all seems!' He continued: 'I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy with zoology (my once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low role of Economic Entomology! Curse ... Why can't I either have a first-rate disease or be a first-rate zoologist?' It is that phrase in parentheses – 'once beloved' zoology – that saddens me. Everything, even the zoology he preferred to money or fame in his early diaries, was subsumed under his existential gloom. The Museum was no cure; instead it became just another symptom." (Fortey, 2008, 195-197)