He said that the word weichselzopf (Vistula plait) was a later alteration of the name wichtelzopf (plait of a wight); wichtel means wight in German, a being or sentient thing. In the second half of the 19th century, some medical professionals waged a war against superstition and lack of hygiene among the peasantry, and traditional folk medicine. Many plaits, often to the horror of their owners, were cut off. In Western Galicia, Professor Józef Dietl made a particular effort to examine and treat Polish plaits. He was also a politician, and his methods of dealing with persons with plicas are controversial today: he organized an official census of people suffering from the disease, they were not allowed to receive help by charitable organizations, were forbidden entrance to some buildings such as schools and offices, and he also proposed fines, which spawned rumors that plaits would be taxed. Those practices were said to have helped eradicate the Polish plait in the region. A huge 1.5-meter long plica can be seen preserved in the Museum of the Faculty of Medicine of Jagiellonian University Medical College in Kraków. In the areas of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth which were occupied by the Russian Empire, young men with plica were exempt from service in the tsarist army. It is unknown how many plicas were natural or how many were man-made dreadlocks. The Polish word for the Polish plait, kołtun, is now used figuratively in Poland to denote an uneducated person with an old-fashioned mindset. In folklore Plica was believed to be caused by supernatural entities. The names often describe the believed cause of tangled hair. In Britain this condition was believed to be caused by elves, hence the name "elflock" (mentioned in Shakespearean poetry and folk tales), although this term could refer to tangles much milder than a Polish plait. Folk belief in Germany associated it with witches or wights (Hexen or Wichtel) giving plica the names Hexenzopf or Wichtelzopf; in Poland, the cause was an unclean spirit. One of the names of plica in Polish was wieszczyca, "wieszcz" means bard, specifically, a folk poet with the gift of prophesy or a vampire-like living person. In German folklore, plica appears in one of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, in which a girl doesn't comb her hair for one year and finds golden coins in her plica. Many illnesses were associated with plica and were synonymous with