ABSTRACT
The chapter traces how, leading up to and in the wake of the 1908 Punjab epidemic, increasingly insistent public calls for mosquito extirpation ultimately forced the GOI to take into confidence senior medical, sanitary, and military officials regarding the economic dimensions to the phenomenon of ‘exalted’ (highly lethal) malaria in the subcontinent. It did so by presenting the results of the Duars inquiry at the February 1909 Bombay Medical Congress, and Christophers’s Punjab findings regarding the role of ‘scarcity’ in the 1908 malaria epidemic at the major (‘Imperial’) malaria conference eight months later. It presents an account of the week-long Malaria Conference at Simla in October 1909 where Christophers’s findings framed the proceedings and where the ‘malaria problem’ in India was formally articulated as one directed primarily to reducing malaria lethality rather than malaria transmission. It details the delicate balancing act the GOI faced in bringing onside ardent proponents of ‘vector extirpation’ with its own prioritisation of malaria mortality control. In addition to committing to famine prevention, the task involved redeeming the therapeutic reputation of quinine, undermined by highly publicised reports of blackwater fever among Europeans on the northeastern tea plantations. The chapter also traces the limited truce, post-Simla, between the so-called malaria mitigators and eradicators within the Indian Medical Service and sanitary administration that ultimately led to the 1911 compromise Resolution officially heralding vector control ‘trials’ in select urban settings, while behind the scenes famine policy was quietly transformed into routine pre-emptive drought relief.
