More I learned from The Fever

Where were we?

Perhaps the discovery that mosquitos spread malaria. For years it was presumed that swamp gas and miasmas caused malaria (hence, of course, its name.) In 1880, a French surgeon stationed in Algeria named Alphonse Laveran first saw Plasmodium in action on a blood slide, seemingly by a random accident of timing. He prepared an infected blood slide and wandered off for 15 or so minutes. In this time the blood had cooled, tricking the parasite into thinking it had returned to an Anopheles's body. The males had sprouted flagella and were looking for wimmen and were squiggling about.

Around the same time, a Scottish physician named Patrick Manson stationed in China had figured out that a type of disgusting worm parasite called filariasis was transmitted by mosquitoes, although he was fairly wrong about a number of things (he thought mosquitoes only bit once in their lives and that the disease was caused by drinking water containing the bodies of contaminated mosquitoes.)  He teamed up with a doctor in the Indian Medical Service named Ronald Ross who apparently was a tool and kind of an idiot. At least, the author thinks so:

Ronald Ross was like many other docs in the British Raj's Indian Medical Service. He professed no particular interest in public health or medicine, or even India, and wasn't especially accomplished.

And his personal correspondence seems to bear out the author's opinions. With disdain for both victims of malaria and naturalists who would know about their vector candidate, he set about trying to prove Manson's theories in India but mainly succeeded in making all the locals distrust and avoid him, for good reason. It was really two Italians who discovered the correct link.

The builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand De Lesseps, had tried to build a canal in Panama too (note: where is the date? The author only says they abandoned the effort in 1889. Sloppy, sloppy.) He wanted to protect his workers from the scourges of yellow fever and malaria and invested money in building hospitals with watered gardens and hospital beds with legs that sat in buckets of water to prevent spiders and ants from getting into the patients' linens. Instead, he of course created an even more perfect mosquito habitat and the project was abandoned and his company went bankrupt. Poor dude. He lost his wife and child due to malaria while building the Suez Canal.

Finally of course the Panama Canal was built to the Americans with the help of an Army surgeon named Gorgas. The author does not think as highly of him as Wikipedia does, particularly with his (well, the whole US Government's) racist treatment of non-white canal laborers. BTW, the Panama Canal is how malaria was introduced to Barbados as the infected workers brought it home.