ROSS AND MALARIAL FEVER 135
introduced into Spain by her physician, Juan del Vigo, in 1640. The fact that cinchona, being a specific, not only cures malarial fever, but also differentiates it from other infections, gave a peculiar impetus to the study of the disease, which was carefully followed in England by Sydenham and Morton, in the seventeenth century, by Lind and Pringle, in the eighteenth century, and in Italy, by two great physicians, Lancisi and Torti. Lancisi, in 1717, published a large treatise on the noxious airs of swamps,^ in which he revives views of the earlier Koman writers about the insects arising from them, in particular, the mosquitoes (Culices), of which he gives a naturalist's account, even suggesting their possible agency in inoculating disease. While he still held, in part, to the ancient doctrine of miasms or effluvia taken into the bodv via the
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respiratory and alimentary tracts, he was prone to regard these effluvia as organized or organic. The following luminous sentences, which have not been translated before, reveal the quality of his vision :
Cap. XVII., III. (p. 61): In a previous chapter, I have shown that mos- quitoes {Culices) and other insects make their nests on the water during summer. It can therefore be easily seen that near swamps, where there are so many kinds of organisms and whence their multitudes are thrown into the surrounding air, the water, which the inhabitants use for drinking, is infected with these organisms.
Cap. XVIII., IX. (p. 66) : Furthermore, no controversy can surely arise among professional men concerning the harmful effect which the insects of the swamps inflict upon us by mixing their noxious juices with their saliva and gastro-intestinal fluids. For, as I have shown above at length, their proboscis is always wet, and, as all their viscera are full of deleterious liquids, it is not possible that the juices rolling down with food and liquids into the stomach, are not there mixed with our ferments. . . . For this reason, we may conclude that marshy insects are highly injurious to the body of man by the inmixture of deadly juices as well as by the withdrawal of the useful ones which are in us.
Cap. XIX., III. (p. 72) : Moreover, I take the role of a seer and not of a philosopher if I, without experiments, venture to affirm that, in camp fevers of this sort, the worms penetrate and ascend the blood vessels. For it would be necessary that the blood of thosre suffering from marsh fevers should be let, which medical reason seldom admits; and to carefully examine the blood with a microscope for iuFects of this kind, if such there be. But, although worms might be seen in the drawn blood, it would still be doubtful that these insects should be considered as the cause of the evil; or whether, which I consider more probable, it is the product of the breaking down of the fluids; whence all tue minute ovules, after they have been wrapped up in particles of the blood, are set free or are supplied from the external air. I can therefore form no opinion from autopsies whether these diseases are carried by insects into the bloou. Being rather content with a confession of my own ignorance, I must frankly concede that neither in abscesses due to nature or produced artificially in patients who frequently come from the neighboring swamps to Rome, nor in the exam- ination of dead bodies, have I found insects in other viscera than the stomach and intestines, where they found room, quietude and food more easily than
16. M. Lancifi, ** De noxiis paludum effluviis eorumqiie reniediis, " Rome, 1717.
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