ABSTRACT
In the past, the experience of disease has figured as a backdrop in histories of medical responses to disease. Wallace’s experience of ‘intermittent fever,’ as malarious fevers were also known in the mid-nineteenth century, came on the cusp of major changes in medical perceptions of fever, which would result in the definition of malaria as a parasitical disease rather than one that derived from bad air—mal’aria. Historically, malaria is one of the most widely experienced diseases of the human race. It plagued our hominid ancestors, and even when the written record fails to mention it, malaria has left its traces. The experience of the symptoms of the disease has shaped literary conventions, as well as medical cures. In the twentieth century nations have also experienced malaria as an aspect of their competition with other nations, both in the initial scramble to understand the etiology of the disease and in the subsequent campaigns for control and eradication.
