Malaria 525 



fever and headache disappear and the patient commonly 

 sinks into a refreshing sleep. The frequency of the paroxysms 

 varies with the type of the disease, which, in its turn, can be 

 referred to the kind of infection by which it is caused. The 

 paroxysms exhaust the patient and incapacitate him and 

 may eventually prove fatal, though in by far the greater 

 number of cases the disease gradually expends itself and a 

 partial or complete recovery ensues. Some cases, known 

 as pernicious, are rapidly fatal, others develop into a 

 chronic cachexia, with profound anemia and complete in- 

 capacitation for physical or mental effort. The discovery 

 of Peruvian or Jesuits' bark, and its introduction into Europe 

 by the Countess del Cinchon, the wife of the Viceroy of Peru, 

 about 1639, marked an important epoch in the study of 

 malarial fever. The isolation of its alkaloids, quinin and 

 cinchona, begun in 1810 by Gomez and perfected in 1820 

 by Pelletier and Coventou, a second great epoch. But the 

 most important epoch began in 1880, when Charles Louis 

 Alphonse Laveran,* a French physician engaged in the study 

 of malarial fever in Algeria, announced the discovery of a 

 parasite, to which he gave the name Plasmodium malariae, 

 in the blood of patients suffering from the disease. His ob- 

 servations were immediately confirmed, Biitschli recognizing 

 the parasitic nature of the bodies observed. For the discov- 

 ery he was awarded the Breant prize. 



Laveran, however, threw no light upon the source of in- 

 fection, and malaria continued to be described as a mias- 

 matic disease. 



It was, however, recognized that there were different 

 types of parasites corresponding to the different clinical 

 forms of the disease, and Golgif succeeded in correlating 

 the various appearances of the parasites so as to express 

 their life cycles. But in spite of the interesting and im- 

 portant work of Golgi, Celli, Bignami and Marchiafava, and 

 many others no progress was made in accounting for the 

 entrance of the parasites into the human body. 



This problem had long interested Sir Patrick Manson, 

 who had devised a theory which, though wrong in de- 

 tail, proved in the end to open the door to the next im- 

 portant discovery. Finding that the malarial parasites 

 could not be shown to leave the body in any of its elimina- 



* "Acad. d. Med.," Paris, Nov. 28 and Dec. 28, 1880. 

 t "R. Acad. di Medicina di Torino," 1885, xi, 20. 



