Two monographs on malaria and the parasites of malarial fevers : I. Marchiafava and Bignami. II. Mannaberg.
- Date:
- 1894
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Two monographs on malaria and the parasites of malarial fevers : I. Marchiafava and Bignami. II. Mannaberg. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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![CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. The discovery of the malarial parasite was made on the 6th of November, 1880, by the French military surgeon A. Laveran, professor at the Val de Grace Medical School. This investigator was at that time in active service at Constantine, a military station in Algiers, where malaria is exceedingly rife. Using the opportunity, he undertook the task of making a new revision of the pathological anatomy of malaria. He began this work by in- vestigating, in the first place, the formation of pigment in the organism. A thought, as logical as it was happy, led him to observe the pigment in the blood obtained from patients, in order by this means to augment the results already obtained from post- mortem material. Although before him many other investigators had examined the blood of malarious patients microscopically, and had recognised certain pigmented bodies in it as being pigment- carrying leucocytes of the malarial blood, it was Laveran who first conjectured the parasitic nature of these bodies and who tho- roughly convinced himself of the correctness of his conjecture by long-continued observations. This new conception of a well-known condition, which numerous observers since Heinrich Meckel had passed by without appreciating its importance, contributed so much the more to Laveran’s fame because his discovery came at a time when the Klebs-Tommasi-Crudelhs bacillus malarix appeared to have cleared up the etiology of malaria, and to have met with very general acceptance. As I have often met with many misleading remarks in German, French, and Roman authors in this connection, I take the opportunity here of referring to previous statements made con- cerning the pigment in blood. Heinrich Meckel [1], in 1847, was the first to find and to describe pigment in the blood and in the organs of the dead body of an insane patient. The results of the post-mortem (slate-coloured staining of the grey substance of the brain, very large spleen, enlarged liver, oedema) permitted no doubt that the patient had 16](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21303563_0285.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
