Some personal observations made in Pennsylvania and in Texas regarding malarial fever and the anopheles mosquito / by Albert Woldert, M.D., of Tyler, Texas.

  • Woldert, Albert, 1867-1959
Date:
[1906?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Some personal observations made in Pennsylvania and in Texas regarding malarial fever and the anopheles mosquito / by Albert Woldert, M.D., of Tyler, Texas. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    200 yards from this barn I also discovered a breeding- ground for the Anopheles. At 5.30 p.m. on August 7, 1900, I selected several specimens of blood from the end of the finger of the patient, and stained the malarial parasites with methylene-blue and also by Manson’s carbol-fuchsin method. But if I should be now called upon to designate more reliable stains I would name the Nocht-Romanowsky (which is the best) or Wright or the carbol-thionin stains. August 16, 1900, on going to the same neighborhood from which this patient came, I obtained the following interesting history of events to the inhabitants living within a radius of perhaps 100 yards : “Mrs. D. had chills in 1899 and again in the spring of 1900 ; Mrs. M., a near neighbor, had chills in the early spring of 1900; Mr. W. had chills six weeks ago; Mr. D. had chills two weeks ago; Mr. R. had chills last week.” It is also interesting to relate that every one of these patients, as well as the one who came to my clinic at the Howard Hospital, had suffered with chills recurring every two days. It goes without say¬ ing that somebody suffering with tertian chills was responsible for and started the epidemic of malarial fever in that locality. I may add that in Philadelphia I never but once failed to find the malarial-carrying mosquito (invariably the Anopheles quadrimaculata) in the houses in which autochthonous cases of malarial fever prevailed. I might also note almost the same experience in Texas, except that in Texas I have not yet failed to find them. I might add that a distinguished physician of Philadel¬ phia jocularly informed me that “ I would not find the malarial-carrying mosquito in that city.” During the period in which I was engaged in investi¬ gating the life history of the Anopheles I was also busy endeavoring to determine whether or not I could make the malarial parasite grow and develop in the middle intestine of the Anopheles in order to prove the claim
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