Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1883-10-03
MALARIA AND MARSHES.

The theoretical notions about malaria
form an instructive page of medical his
tory. Until about 1923 it was always
thought to be associated with marshes and
swamps, but in that year DR.. William Fer
gusson brought to England numerous proofs
that it occurred abundantly in elevated
and rocky regions. Such evidences have
gone on accommodating, and it is now well
known that malaria has no necessary con.
nection with the marsh. But the profess
sion is still profoundly impressed with the
belief that malaria is an actual or material
poisonous substance. 10 Homer it was the
arrows of Apollo in anger, to the medieval
folk lore it was the mischief of elves and
sprites and if scientific medicine does not
now permit US to personify the malaria, it
teaches US at least to materialiZe it.
Although the fevers which malaria
produces are quite unlike the fe-
vers that are contagious or communi-
cable, the present scientific guides of the
profession are resolved to find a material
virus or poison as the cause of them. The
malarial poison was sought for, in the early
days of chemistry, among the various gases
of the marsh, but the chemical search
proved fruitless. When the microscope
came in, the miasm was diligently looked
for in the soil of malarious localities, and
in the vapors overhanging them. From
lS49 to the present year some twenty diff
ferent vegetable organisms or their spores,
of various degrees of complexity, have
been described each in its turn as the ma.
larious miasm, and as the specific cause of
remittent and intermittent fevers and the
quest for material substance assumed to
be the cause of malarial fever is regarded
with much favor in the best scientific
circles. Meanwhile a body of opinion,
which takes due account of all the mani
fold associated circumstances of malaria
throughout the world, has been forming
and yearly growing in volume, that there
is no malarious miasm at all that
malaria" indeed, is profound dis
organization of the nervous mechanism
that presides over the temperature of the
body; and that this upsetting of the heat
regulating center is likely to happen when
the body has been exposed during the day
to extreme solar heat, and to fatigue, and
exposure at shutdown and in the night to
the tropical or sub.tropical chill, which
will be severe in proportion to the rapid
cooling of the ground and the amount Of
vapor condensed in the lowest stratum of
the air. There is no more beautiful me-
chanism in nature than that which keeps
mans internal heat always about ninety.
eight degrees day and night, summer and
winter, in the Arctic regions or in the
tropics but even that most wonderful of
all self adapting pieces of mechanism, if it
be taxed too much, as by extremes of day
~,,LN 49, -
gear and a fever, still retaining something
of the diurnal periodicity, will be the re-
suit. No one can read the powerful crit.
cism of Surgeon-Major Oldham. of the In.
dian Medical Service, without discovering
this rational explanation of malaria to have
the best of the facts and the best of the
logic on its side. The decision of this
point of theory one way or another has the
most momentous issues, not so much for
the treatment of malsrious fever as for its
prevention. It is, in short, question, on
the one hand, of common prudence in
warm countries, more often moist than
arid, and more often level than mountain
GUS, against exposure of the body to the d.
rect action of the SUMS rays and to the
nightly chill that follows or, on the other
hand, of fatalist doctrine of vegetable
spores or organisms of the lowest grade max
ing ceaseless war upon mankind. The world
has way of finding out the truth by its
experiences on the large scale. 1t settled
the inane theoretical objections to the
value of cinchona bark, and it will prob
ably form its own opinion on the relative
merits of the vegetable-spore theory of
malaria and the theory of exposure and
climatic vicissitudes. 1t will be regret
table circumstance if in this matter the
profession has to follow public opinion
instead of leading it.-[Quarterly Review.