Malaria and ecosystems: historical aspects

The history of malaria has been dominated by the discoveries of Ronald Ross and Giovanni Battista Grassi, and the malaria eradication campaign of the World Health Organization. Much of this has tended towards the hagiographic or celebratory, although reviews of the malaria eradication programme have become increasingly critical. Recent literature on the history of malaria has been set within a framework which discusses the history of tropical and colonial medicine or military medicine. The Malaria and ecosystems volume, following a conference of the same name, builds upon this existing literature but attempts to take a more synthetic approach to the history of malaria by considering the interrelationship of the disease, its pathogen and its vector in terms of the wider physical and human environment. The diversity of the essays in this volume highlights the value of such an approach. The authors vary widely in their backgrounds, and thus the papers are the work of historians, scientists and malariologists. While it was a conscious aim of the meeting and the publication to present papers which could contribute towards improving the current understanding of the world malaria situation, this has not detracted from the quality of the historical writing. Most of the essays deal with the latter half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, but those by Mirko D Grmek and Julian de Zulueta also refer to the prehistoric and ancient period. Taken as a whole, the papers in this volume offer a valuable chronology of malaria ecology and attempts to understand and interefere with the ecological balance as a means to controlling or eradicating the disease. Emphasis is placed on the history of realizing and taking action against the malaria-carrying mosquitoes of the Anopheles group, but there are several useful comments on the chemotherapy of malaria and the importance of the general health and socio-economic circumstances of the human population at risk or affected by the disease. These are areas which are open for future study. Five of the papers are concerned with malaria in Europe. These include work on laboratory research and field experimentation. Michael Worboys' article describes the etiology of malaria before Alphonse Laveran's discovery of the protozoan parasite, placing malaria in a wider discussion of nineteenthcentury fever nosography. Mary Dobson and Bernardino Fantini provide detailed accounts of malaria epidemiology in England and Italy, including anophelism without malaria (Fantini), and the implications of understanding the species complex. The contributions on the European research are of particular interest since much of the recent work on tropical malaria has not reconsidered the work done in Europe and its effects on malaria in the tropics. The papers by John Farley, Paulo Gadelha and Randall Packard explore the early work of the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations in malaria control between the two world wars. They demonstrate the antecedents of internationally sponsored global eradication campaigns. The conclusion from these papers is that the politics of international health influenced the interpretation of vector eradication trials, with significant consequences for the post-war anti-malarial campaigns. The papers on Asia and Africa are naturally selective, given the diverse malaria situation of these huge regions of the world. This is acknowledged by reference to the