The prevention of malaria.

  • Ronald Ross
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The prevention of malaria. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    33/768
    study, blamed a kind of Pahnella; and after 1878, a number of Italian workers, Lanzi and Terrigi, Edwin Klebs and C. Tommasi-Crudeli, thought that they had actually incriminated certain fungi or bacteria, which they said swarm in malarious places, occur in the blood, produce spores before each paroxysm of fever, and cause similar infection in animals. These findings were even confirmed by Marchiafava and other Italians; but have now been completely discredited. In 1878, however, A. Laveran commenced his studies of the subject at Bone in Algeria, by following up the granules of pigment, already referred to, in the blood of living patients. He was struck by the fact that they were frequently contained within cells possessing active amoeboid movements ; and, finally, on the 6th November 1880, at Constantine, he detected the microgametes issuing from the male cell. Though at the time he did not know the nature of this phenomenon, it convinced him that he was dealing with a living parasite of the human red corpuscles. In fact the black granules are merely the excrementitious matter produced by the parasites from the substance of the red cells, and contained within their bodies, or released in the tissues of the host.1 About the same time C. Gerhardt proved that healthy persons can be infected by the inoculation of blood of patients suffering from paludism [1884]. His experiments were after- wards verified by many workers, and demonstrate (apart from the microscopical discovery of the parasites) that the disease is not due to any gaseous emanation from marshes, but is a true infection by some living virus. In 1886 and subsequently, C. Golgi, who was favourably situated in Pavia for the work, showed clearly that the parasites 1 Recently R. Blanchard (Archi. de Parasitologic, vol. vii. 1903) would have us believe that one P. F. H. Klencke had discovered the parasite of malaria before Laveran ; but it is perfectly obvious from Klencke's drawings, given by Blanchard, that his parasites are merely the usual artifacts found in fresh blood. Klencke, moreover, was not studying malaria at all, but vertigo. Medical literature is full of such simulacra.