Volume 1

The prevention of malaria / by Ronald Ross ; with contributions by L.O. Howard [and others].

  • Ronald Ross
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

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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    causes described in sections 30 (20). North [1896] ascribes the intensification to rural depopulation—due to wars or to economical changes. I think it more probable that the malaria produced, or helped to produce, the rural depopulation; and we now have the living picture of the process before our eyes in Mauritius. Possibly also the disease has always had a tendency to eliminate or repel the fair strain of blood from the north, leaving the darker southern strains predominant. But the effect in Italy was probably less than in Greece, owing to the much smaller proportion of malarious area in the former. Of course the Roman writers, both medical and non-medical, were acquainted with the leading facts about paludism mentioned above. The erudite Varro (116-28 B.C.) says in his Rerum Rusticarum, “ Animadvertendum etiam si quo erunt loca palustria, et propter easdem causas, et quod crescunt animalia quaedam minuta, quae non possunt oculi consequi, et per aera intus in corpus, per os ac nares perveniunt atque difficiles efficiunt morbos”—that in marshes there are animals too small to be seen, but which enter the mouth and nostrils and cause troublesome diseases. Other famous passages are from Columella (about the first century B.C.), who says that bogs breed insects armed with stings, and pestilent swimming and creeping things, from which come obscure diseases. Here we have malaria connected not only with the marsh, but with insects or germs bred in the marsh. Cicero and Seneca say that paludism depopulated certain districts. Mr Robert Gladstone and Mr Jones have kindly called my attention to several passages referring to mosquito nets, called conopeum by the Romans, after the Greeks (our word canopy). Herodotus first noted with surprise the use of them in Egypt; and they are referred to later in Varro {De Re Rustica 2, 10, 8), Horace (Epodes, 9, 16), Propertius (3, 11, 45), Juvenal (6, 80), and Paulus Silentiarius (Anthologia Palatind). Horace says, “And among the military standards, oh, shame! the sun sees a