4 i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



MALARIA.' 



By CHAELES P. EUSSEL, M. D. 



THE terms malaria and miasm in medical phraseology include the 

 causes of a large class of affections what are known more par- 

 ticularly as zymotic diseases, which depend upon a variety of specific 

 organic poisons wbose essential nature, composition, and form, are 

 mostly inappreciable as yet by scientific research. The general under- 

 standing, however, of these terms, is more limited ; and, in conformity 

 with the popular idea, I shall in the present paper confine their appli- 

 cation to the cause of those wide-spread disorders, intermittent and re- 

 mittent fevers the former of which is so well known as " chills and 

 fever" or " fever and ague." 



" Time out of mind," as Watson remarks, " it had been matter of 

 common observation that the inhabitants of wet and marshy situations 

 were especially subject to these definite and unequivocal forms of dis- 

 ease." The same natural agencies which are now at work elaborating, 

 evolving, and disseminating malaria must have been equally in opera- 

 tion ever since the surface of the earth assumed its present condition. 

 Vast and remote wildernesses that have never known human presence 

 teem, as of yore, with deadly exhalations that almost preclude the 

 bold attempts of enterprising man to lay bare their secrets. There 

 are some parts of India, as Bishop Heber informs us, wdiich even mon- 

 keys and other wild animals instinctively desert between April and 

 October of each year. The tigers go up to the hills; the antelopes 

 and wild-hogs make incursions into the cultivated plains ; and those 

 persons, such as dak-bearers and military people, who are obliged to 

 venture into the marshy jungles, agree that not so much as a bird can 

 be heard or seen in the frightful solitude. 



The celebrated Pontine Marshes may be regarded as the classic 

 home of malaria. The older historical records describe this tract as 

 occupied with numerous towns by the Volsci. It was evidently a fer- 

 tile region ; for we read in Livy that the early Romans sent thither 

 during a season of scarcity for a supply of corn. Three hundred and 

 twelve years n. c, the Censor Appius Claudius Csecus constructed 

 the Appian Way across the length of the Pontine region, the soil of 

 which must then have been sufficiently compact to support the heavy 

 causeway. At some period of the subsequent century and a half, the 

 country seems to have undergone great deterioration either from nat- 

 ural or civil causes, and to have become partially inundated ; for, about 

 170 b. c.j we find the Consul Cornelius Cethegus applying himself to 

 draining the marshes, aiid restoring the land to cultivation and salu- 



1 A portion of a paper read before the New York Public Health Association, April 

 13, 1870. 



