Two monographs on malaria and the parasites of malarial fevers : I. Marchiafava and Bignami. II. Mannaberg.

Date:
1894
Catalogue details

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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    here, in which also the hyaline, non-nucleated, pigmented bodies were distinguished from the lymph-cells, and for the first time the possibility was considered of the joigment being formed, not, as Mechel and Virchow considered, in the spleen, but in the circulating blood. Planer also appears to have been the first who began the practice of examining the blood of patients and saw the pigmented bodies in fresh blood. Later investigators have added nothing to our knowledge of the “ pigment cells/* so that we now return to Laveran, who has at one stroke placed in a new light the import- ance of these bodies. Laveran found his opinion confirmed that these hyaline pig- mented bodies in the blood of malarial patients were parasites when, on the 6th of November, 1888, as he was occupied in examining the blood from one such body several long flagella suddenly made their appearance, and thereupon commenced lively lashing movements in the blood. At first, on account of these flagella, he held these bodies to be forms belonging to the genus Oscillaria, and suggested, therefore, the name of Oscillaria malarix for them. It soon, however, became evident that they must be placed in the species of the Protozoa, about which more details will be given later on. Laveran published his observations in a short note to the Academie de Medecine in Paris (at a meeting on the 23rd of November, 1880) [7] ; soon after (at a meeting on the 28th of December) he published a second note [8] to the same Society giving the points in which the bodies found by him were differentiated from melaniferous leucocytes. Just a year later (1881) he published a small monograph with illustrations [9], and at the same time reported to the Academie des Sciences in Paris on the most important points in his results. As we shall subsequently often have to refer to the contents of this, Laveran*s first publication, I think it will be convenient to quote several sentences from it, and I give the text of his com- munication to the Academie des Sciences on the 24th of October, 1881 [10]. Laveran writes, “ There exist in the blood of patients suffering from malaria certain parasitic elements which present themselves under the following aspects : “ 1. Cylindrical elements fringed at their extremity, and almost always curved in the form of a crescent. The length of these bodies is *008 mm. to ’009 mm. ; their average breadth ’003 mm. Their margin is indicated by a very fine line. The body is transparent and colourless, save at its middle, where there is a darkish spot formed by pigment granules of a very dark red colour.