Medical Officers of the Army of India.

33

Practical Conclusions.

      * Campagna Romana.

      Grassi, Celli and others basing their suggestions on the experiment of Drs.
Low and Sambon, who spent two months
in the most feverish part of Italy * and
who by shutting themselves up in a mosquito-proof hut at sundown, thereby
escaping malarial fever, propose perforated zinc houses (mosquito-proof) to dwell
in. Few persons in India, after a noonday temperature of 117º F. in the shade
would care to shut themselves up in such a cage. To put the native population,
men, women and children, who sometimes have only sufficient money to keep
body and soul together, under mosquito nets or in mosquito-proof houses is out
of the question.

      To cleanse the " Augean stable " of anopheles is a task only possible to
Hercules himself.

      Get rid of puddles by all means, but I doubt whether, even if the whole
population of India were put to the work of filling up all the puddles during the
rains, the results would justify the expense.

      The paddyfields, which are the main source of food throughout a great
part of India, will have to be abolished. Is the population to starve in the mean-
time ? Get rid of all the pools and puddles in India, and you will only find that
the anopheles will change its habitat; or abolish anopheles altogether, and how do
we know that we shall be rid of malaria ? My view is that the malarial parasite is
trimorphic and that there is a phase (extra-corporeal) yet to be discovered.

      The means of preventing the spread of malaria lie in two directions: (1) in
the free use of quinine; (2) in the segregation of all suffering from ague.

      Quinine, in a few cases I have noted, prevents the impregnation of the macro-
gamete by the flagellum of the microgamete and the zygotes fail to develop in
the stomach of the anopheles. Quinine is therefore useful in checking the endo-
genous as well as the exogenous evolution of the Laveran's bodies. The segre-
gation of infected individuals will be as difficult a task as the destruction of the
anopheles.

     The 27th January 1901.