Malaria and its Influence on National History

Abstract

WIDESPREAD disease, in the form of plagues and pestilences, has profoundly influenced the course of events, local or national, in various countries. The Biblical narrative contains instances of this, and the black death left its mark on European history; in fact, Dr. Gasquet regards the black death as the most important event of the Middle Ages, and a prime factor in the making of modern England. The presence of disease in a locality may in many ways disturb life and enterprise there. Thus the failure of the early attempts to cut the Panama Canal may in part be attributed to the terrible mortality among the labourers, principally from malignant malarial fevers, and the existence of tsetse-fly disease (which attacks horses, &c.) in wide tracts of country in Africa has rendered the problem of transport and the opening up of such districts a difficult one. Prescott, in his “History of the Conquest of Mexico,” though writing without the knowledge we now possess, remarks that we find no mention in the records of any uncommon mortality among the conquerors, Cortes and his companions. Had yellow fever and malaria prevailed in the country as they have done in more recent times, in all probability the Spanish conquest of Mexico would never have been accomplished.