E. Douglas Hume
I hold no brief for the mosquito. She has always treated me as a mere restaurant, and I have provided her with so many meals that I feel all obligations to be already on her side. Also, her extreme talkativeness is almost as objectionable as her voracious appetite. Any one who has been kept awake by her buzz-z-z, buzz-z-z, buzz-z-z, on a tropical night must have come to the conclusion that “good will to all men” can never be strained to include good will to all insects. Moreover, the fact that the lady of the species alone feasts upon blood seems a reflection on the female sex. Yet, so it is: her husband is a harmless vegetarian.
All the same, when a sense of justice is strong, one does resent the misdemeanors of man being laid at the door of even the most exasperating insect. Certainly the sturdiest viewpoint of disease is to regard it as the outcome of inattention, personal or general, to one or other of nature’s observances. Instead, nowadays, parasitic organisms are blamed for most of the aches and pains of humanity, while their distributors are searched for in the realm of insects and animals. The mosquito has, perhaps, fallen a prey to her own weakness. Had she talked less, it is possible that she might have evaded her doubtful celebrity. As it is, she stands accused of being concerned with a no less formidable array of maladies than elephantiasis, yellow fever, dengue, and malaria.
Let us here concern ourselves with the last-mentioned, and the hungry suspect, whose name has been coupled with the disease, her Ladyship Anopheles.
She may at once be singled out from her fellows by her habit of discreet silence and her odd proclivity for standing on her head when resting and feeding. Other mosquitoes remain on all fours, or rather, all sixes, when dining. This acrobatic insect is, as everyone knows, accused of inoculating her human prey with a protozoon, or microscopic animal organism, which in its turn is held responsible for the heats and chills, the aches, the pains, the languor, all the miseries of malaria. The idea is a simple one,
requiring little intelligence to be understood. Is it rude to ask, what wonder that it has become popular? Less marvel, too, when one reflects that the theory is safeguarded by dividing Anophelines into a variety of groups, and claiming that the guilty must be the right sort, and yet further, the right sort duly infected.
Now, the means of infection must come about through the insect having feasted on a malarial subject. That its subsequent bite might poison the healthy sounds a contingent by no means unlikely. The drawback to this probability is that the mosquito possesses the feminine characteristic of fastidiousness. Malarial subjects are the very ones avoided by her hungry Ladyship. Here I may interject that I am not writing of insects under control. What a famished mosquito may or may not eat during the course of an experiment, I am not concerned with. I refer to mosquitoes in a natural state, and personal experience has made me observe that the one benefit of malaria consists in the freedom it confers from mosquito bites. Though these insects are in the habit of treating me as a very Ritz or a Carlton among restaurants, periods of malaria always freed me from their ravages. They like their food to be of the best, and the blood freest from fever is the provender for their delectation. During nineteen years of tropical life, my mother never experienced a single attack of malaria; yet she was always the chief pièce de résistance for every mosquito within her vicinity. It may be noticed that the individuals least susceptible to malaria are those most feasted upon by mosquitoes, including the suspects, though whether these be Anopheles Umbrosus, Anopheles Maculatus, Anopheles Christophersi, Anopheles Albimanus, Anopheles Argyritarsis, or any others of high-sounding title, I should certainly not presume to discriminate.
Why should this general evidence count for less than the few experimental cases upon which the mosquito theory is built up? These latter are mostly conspicuous by their weakness. Take, for example, the mosquito-proof hut placed at Ostia, and inhabited for three months by Dr. Sambon, Dr. Low, Mr. Terzi, and their servants. What analogy does this well-ventilated erection, raised above the soil, bear to many of the insanitary homesteads
of the Campagna? What analogy is there between its healthy inhabitants, further fortified by zest for a theory in dire need of proof, and the permanent dwellers in those unpropitious surroundings? If we admit strength in the case of the infected mosquitoes sent to the London Tropical School, whose stings are said to have produced attacks of fever in the late Dr. Thurburn Manson and Mr. George Warren, we must also remember that Abele Sola in the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, according to the account quoted by Herms in his Malaria: Cause and Control, is claimed to have fallen a victim to this disease from the bites of mosquitoes that had developed from larvæ in his own room, and therefore could not be reckoned as infected. Moreover, they numbered hardly any Anophelines, and of the very few present, it was not known whether any stung the patient. Yet, according to the modern theory, Anophelines alone could have been responsible for the mischief. The proverbial grain of salt seems a necessary condiment for the cases of experimenters.
In the short space at our disposal, we are not concerning ourselves with the micro-organism, first discovered in Algiers by Dr. Laveran, and considered to be the parasite of malaria. Without in the least committing oneself to a general belief in the germ-theory of disease, there may, here and there, be maladies produced by parasites. Yet, apparently, fever, bearing all the clinical symptoms of malaria, may occur without the presence in the blood of such organisms, no matter whether parasitic or inbred. On page 8 of the Medical Report of the Federated Malay States’ Government reference is made to an unusual swarm of sandflies, and the following commentary is given. “Whether sandfly fever exists we are not prepared to say, but many cases with all the clinical symptoms were noted and no malarial parasite was detected on blood examination.” Hence the sandflies come under suspicion! Might not another moral be drawn, and that is that fever may be due to causes less crude than the inoculation of parasites by objectionable insects?