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It was the old story of "Wolf, wolf"; there had been so many supposed "germs" that the profession had become suspicious. Several years elapsed before Surgeon-General Sternberg called the attention of the English-speaking world to Laveran's work: it was taken up actively in Italy, and in America by Councilman, Abbott and by others among us in Baltimore.
He took these to be transformations of the plasmodia, "modified in form" and "incapable of producing disease," and pronounced them to be "degenerate" organisms, almost as if they had been deformed and exhausted by the "excess of work" they had previously performed. These organisms were described as "Laveran's degenerative forms."
They passed on indifferently, commending Laveran's "effort of genius," repeating with him: They are degenerate forms. A futile effort, which only increased a crowd of persons who had resigned their own individuality all unconsciously.
After the discovery of the transmission of malaria in 1900, Laveran's "degenerative forms" were recognized as the sexual individuals of the reproductive cycle: individuals which were incapable of conjugation in the blood of man, and could only produce new organisms in the body of the mosquito.
Moreover, we are astonished by something still more serious: how came it that hundreds and thousands of students throughout the world accepted Laveran's error with their eyes shut, that not one among so many took into consideration on his own account the cycle of the protozoa, and that not one was sufficiently independent to set about studying the phenomenon for himself?
The result of these widespread observations was the confirmation in every respect of Laveran's discovery of the association with malaria of a protozoan parasite. This was step number three. Clinical observation, empirical discovery of the cure, determination of the presence of a parasite. Two other steps followed rapidly.
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