Volume 1
The prevention of malaria / by Ronald Ross ; with contributions by L.O. Howard [and others].
- Ronald Ross
- Date:
- 1910
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The prevention of malaria / by Ronald Ross ; with contributions by L.O. Howard [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![references to paludism are scanty in the earlier writers, but very abundant in the later ones. Mr Jones notices, both for Greece and Italy, that many of the most ancient settlements appear to have been made on sites which are now pestilential _suggesting that they were not so unhealthy when they were first selected. Professor R. C. Bosanquet tells me that some of the oldest settlements in Crete, made during the wonderful ancient civilisation of that country thousands of years before Christ, were situated at spots which are now intensely malarious. Many areas round Rome, now scarcely habitable, were the homes of great and prosperous peoples in the prehistoric period, and were later full of the country villas of rich Romans.1 Those who consider that malaria was always very prevalent in ancient Greece and Rome cite legends such as that of the destruction of the Lernean Hydra by Hercules—the Hydra being supposed to be symbolic of malaria. Lerna is a marshy district in Greece, and the Hydra was fabled to inhabit the marshes and to ravage the country round it. It is possible, however, that the fable refers merely to the drainage of the swamps for agricultural purposes. In Italy there was a vast and very old system of soil-drainage by cuniculi, probably constructed by the Etruscans ; and some have suggested that this* drainage was carried out against malaria, and that it enabled the ancients to build villas at spots now deadly. Here, again, the object of the drainage was more probably agricultural. I should like to believe that it was a sanitary drainage, but find difficulty in doing so. Drainage against malaria must obviously be an urban and not a rural measure. The cost of draining all the country round Rome merely for sanitary purposes would have depleted the sanitary budget even of the logical ancients. Mr Jones’s view appears the more probable — namely that the disease was possibly introduced at the time of the first foreign expansions, both in Greece and Italy, and that it gradually became intensified owing to the 1 See also F. Genovese [1909].](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b31347186_0001_0028.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
