United States or Caribbean Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Italians generally have not this paludal notion, for experience taught them long ago that malaria is produced nearly everywhere in marshy districts as well as in those which might almost be called arid; in a volcanic soil as well as in the deposits of the Miocene and Pliocene periods and the ancient and modern alluvia; in a soil rich in organic matters as well as in one containing almost none; in the plains as well as on the hills or mountains.
Thus, among the Greeks, the most refined people that cultivated hero-worship, Hercules was the sun, and the mythologic fable of his destroying with his arrows the many-headed hydra of the Lernaean marshes was but an allegory to denote the dissipation of paludal malaria by the purifying rays of the orb of day.
It has also been thought possible to practice drainage from above by means of plantations of certain trees which would draw considerable moisture from the earth, a method which might really be serviceable in some malarious districts. But in accordance with the idea that malaria is a product of paludal decomposition, the trees selected have almost always been the eucalyptus.
This idea, so widespread and so well established by the traditions of the school, is radically false. The specific ferment which engenders those fevers by its accumulation in the atmosphere which we breathe is not exclusively of paludal origin, and still less is it a product of putrefaction.
A negro will walk naked through a forest in which every drop of water is impregnated with millions of paludal germs, which teems with insects, the bites of which produce malignant abcesses, and where the temperature reaches fifty degrees Centigrade in the shade.
I reject, therefore, wholly the paludal assumption, and in order to express this view in the title of my paper, have been forced to employ terms which to my hearers may sound like italicisms.
Lancisi was completely imbued with the paludal notion, and consequently believed that the very severe malaria of Cistema was brought by the winds from the coast marshes, instead of being produced in the soil surrounding the district, which was then covered by this forest. He believed then that the forest acted as a protective rampart, and he prevented its being cut down.
The disease is generally brought on by insufficient food. It is sometimes called paludal fever, and at others la grippe, and it is epidemic rather than contagious. From 30 to 40 per cent of the people were afflicted with it."
It was only in 1879 that Klebs and myself, after having been thoroughly freed, by a long series of preparatory studies, from the unfortunate paludal idea, undertook together some investigations in malarious districts of the most varied character, marshy and not marshy. We employed the system of fractional cultivation, making experiments on animals with the final products thus obtained.
Unfortunately the investigations undertaken for this end have for a long time been fruitless, for the preconceived paludal theory has led investigators to occupy themselves exclusively with the inferior organisms inhabiting marshes.
Word Of The Day