HISTORY OF MALARIA 



481 



Fifty years ago malaria was so common in our Middle Western 

 States that it was a serious problem. But this malady has grad- 

 ually been reduced by scientific control. 



Malaria is still fairly common in the tropical countries. It 

 was recently estimated that, approximately, 90 per cent of the 

 people of Calcutta are suffering from this disease. 



History of malaria. The ancient Greeks thought that malaria 

 was due to bad air arising from the marshes. Hence they called 

 the disease malaria, which means bad air. Malaria always pre- 

 vailed near swamps and was thought to be caused by some kind 

 of emanation from decaying matter. In 1880, a French army 

 surgeon, Charles Laveran, noted and described the malarial para- 

 sites in the red corpuscles of the blood of persons suffering from 

 malaria. But he was not able to ascertain how they entered the 

 blood. This was not learned until 1895, by Major Ronald Ross, 

 an English army surgeon, who started investigating malaria in 

 India, where malaria was prevalent and existed in its worst form. 

 Discovering that birds were 

 susceptible to malaria, he 

 first studied the organisms in 

 the blood of the birds. He 

 suspected that this disease 

 was not contagious but was 

 transmitted by the bite of a 

 mosquito, and he permitted 

 mosquitoes of a certain spe- 

 cies to bite infected birds. 

 He killed the mosquitoes, 

 and found little swellings in 

 the walls of their stomachs. 

 Then he let similar mosqui- 

 toes bite birds that were not infected with malaria, and no such 

 swellings appeared in the stomach walls. He continued examin- 



1900 



190S 



'^fortaVlt)r from 'Malaria m Italv" 



Am. Museum of Nat. Hist. 



The Italian government has steadily decreased 

 the cases and deaths from malaria. 



