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It was not until 1880, that Laveran, a French army surgeon stationed in Algeria, announced the discovery in the blood of malarial patients of an organism which at first bore his name, the Hematozoon-Laveran, now known as the Plasmodium malariæ. This organism, of all curious places, burrowed into and found a home in the little red corpuscles of the blood.
In 1880 Laveran had described an animal micro-organism, which preyed upon the red corpuscles of the blood, producing an attack of fever with the cycle of its existence. Subsequent studies confirmed and elucidated this fact, and the plasmodium malariae became a matter of common knowledge.
We may well wonder: Why did not Laveran simply recognize those sexual forms, and why did he not seek for the period of conjugation in the plasmodia, which were animal micro-organisms? If he had borne in mind the complete cycle of the protozoa, he would have recognized them.
Beyond the vermin that infest the skin and the hair, tapeworm, and a few other intestinal worms, little if anything was known of morbific parasites before the Nineteenth Century; but the labors of Van Beneden, Küchenmeister, Cobbold, Manson, Laveran, and others have now established the causal relationship between great numbers of animal parasites gross and microscopic and certain definite morbid states.
But evidently Morel's theories of the degeneration of man had made a much livelier impression on his imagination; and his leap from these remote theories to his interpretation of the plasmodia seemed an achievement of "genius." It may be said that this "feat of genius," this visionary generalization, prevented Laveran from seeing the truth.
But although we knew that we could both break up and prevent malaria by doses of quinine large enough to make the head ring, we knew nothing about the cause save that it was always associated with swamps and marshy places until about forty years ago a French army surgeon, Laveran, discovered in the red corpuscles of the blood of malaria patients, a little animal germ, which has since borne his name.
The blood had been studied time and again and the characteristic appearance of the blood of a malarial patient was well known. In 1880 Laveran, a French army surgeon in Algiers, began to study the blood of such patients microscopically and soon was able to demonstrate the parasite that caused the disease.
In 1880, a young French army surgeon, Laveran by name, working in Algiers, found in the microscopic examination of the blood that there were little bodies in the red blood corpuscles, amoeboid in character, which he believed to be the germs of the disease. Very little attention at first was paid to his work, and it is not surprising.
Laveran had found that in the blood of sufferers who recover spontaneously from malarial fever there are a great number of corpuscles which have no longer the rounded forms of the plasmodia, but are crescent-shaped and rayed.
Laveran proved the association of haematozoa with malaria in 1880. In the same year, Griffith Evans discovered trypanosomes in a disease of horses and cattle in India, and the same type of parasite was found in the sleeping sickness.
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