A few general directions with regard to destroying mosquitoes, particularly the yellow fever mosquito / by W. C. Gorgas.

  • Gorgas, W. C.
Date:
1904
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: A few general directions with regard to destroying mosquitoes, particularly the yellow fever mosquito / by W. C. Gorgas. 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.

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    A FEW GENERAL DIRECTIONS WITH REGARD TO DESTROYING MOSQUITOES, PARTICULARLY THE YELLOW FEVER MOSQUITO. As this article is not intended for the reading of people who have given any particular attention to the facts at present known of the way in which the mosquito carries disease from one person to another, I think it best to briefly call attention to the leading points in our present knowledge of this subject. Malaria and yellow fever are the two great diseases with which the mosquito is concerned. They are b}’ lar the most important diseases in the tropical countries of the Western Hemisphere, and play a great part in the sickness of the southern part of the United states. Up to twenty-five years ago it was universally believed that malaria was caused by a gas, or miasm, arising from the decomposition of dead vegetable matter in hot countries, but about that time a French army surgeon in Algeria, Laveran by name, noticed that if he looked sufiiciently carefully with his microscope, in the blood of persons suf- fering from malaria, he could almost always find a very small animal parasite. This little, living being got into the blood in some way, Laveran did not know how, fed upon the red blood corpuscles, and was apparently the cause of the disease which we call malaria. Lav- eran’s discovery was a great advance in our knowledge of the disease, and it was gradually accepted by all the medical world. A careful search was made for the parasite by many investigators, but it could only be found in the blood of human beings suffering from malaria. Where else it was bred and how it got into the blood of man no one could find out. About this time it was discovered by an English army surgeon. Doctor Manson, that a small worm—the Filaria sanguinis homi/nis—was introduced into the body by the bite of a mos- quito. (This worm causes the disease among human beings known as nlariasis, and to it are due the enormous and unsightly swellings of the legs and other parts of the body seen by our people in Cuba and the Philippines. It is, however^ a disease very rarely found in the United States, and not of much importance to us. I only mention it here in connection with my story of the mosquito.) About fifteen years after the discovery of Laveran, that malaria was due to an insect in the blood, and of Manson, that a certain worm which caused disease was introduced into the human blood by the bite of a mosquito, another great English army surgeon, Ronald Ross, discovered that the malarial parasite was found in a certain species of mosquito—the anopheles—after the insect had bitten a human being suffering from malaria. With his miscroscope he followed the Life history of this parasite, from the stomach of the mosquito, through the walls of the stomach into the mosquito’s body, and finally into its