34 AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS 



Malaria. 



It was early observed that "malaria" was apt to be prevalent dur- 

 ing (lamp and rainy seasons, and that it occurred principally in exactly 

 such places as are now known to furnish ideal breeding grounds for the 



Malaria Mosquito. That new cases of malaria annealed at 

 Malarial 

 Seasons l ' le tmie °^ . vear WDen t' u> Malaria Mosquito abounded, was 



also recorded long before it was suspected that the insect was 

 in any way connected with the malady; and one of the old medical 

 writers, mentions as a characteristic of malarial seasons, that "gnats 

 and flies are apt to he abundant." 



Asia is considered to have been the original home of malaria and 

 from there it was introduced into Europe. In the fourth century B. ('. 



it had become established in Greece, and since this time 

 Original Home . . . . , . 



of Malaria ^ ' ias Deen en( ' e,ni( ' in Europe, particularly m the coun- 



tries bordering on the Mediterranean. Its prevalence 

 in Italy and Greece is historic. It is thought to have been an important 

 factor in the decline of the nations of antiquity. 1 



Malaria was formerly considered to be a form of ague due to foul air, 

 whence its name, which literally means "bad air." It was attributed 

 to a sort of "miasma." Its true nature did not become known till 1880, 

 when Laveran, a French military surgeon, working at the time in Algeria, 

 discovered the malarial parasite in human blood. Some years later, 

 Professor Manson of England, directed the attention of Major Ross 



of the Indian Service, to the mosquito as a possible 



Discov6rv of 



Malarial Parasite carrier of malarial infection. It had at this time just 



been discovered that yellow fever was spread by mos- 

 quitoes, and Manson had previously, in 1879, found a Culex mosquito 



carrying the parasite of filarial disease. That the insect might play 

 such a direct and extraordinary role as it does in the transmission of 

 malaria, was, however, not suspected even by Manson. In lS'.t" Ross 

 discovered the presence of the malarial organism in a mosquito of the 

 genus Anopheles, and a little later, through the efforts, chiefly of Ross 

 and the Italian, Grassi, the remarkable life-history of the parasite 

 became known in its entirety. 



1 W. II. S. Jones. Malaria. A neglected factor in the history of Greece and 

 Rome. London. 1907. 



