Malaria: we’ve come a long way in 140 years

This is an excerpt from a letter to Nature published in 1870, written by E. L. Layard, an English naturalist living in South Africa.

Permit me to add my mite to Mr. Horace Waller’s theory respecting the utility of mosquito curtains in warding off fever, generated by the miasma of decaying vegetation.

…

When the body is relaxed in sleep and the pores of the skin act freely, then is the time that the deadly miasma, cold and damp, even in the tropics, seizes on its victim. What jungle traveller does not know the feeling of the air an hour and a half or two hours before daylight? But the warmth from the body and breath within a well-secured mosquito net, I think effectually protects the sleeper.

Vintage Science Saturday

One of the nerdier things I enjoy is reading through back-issues of scientific journals. Really old ones: archival issues of Nature, The American Naturalist, Anthropological Review, The American Microscopical Society and others, dating back to 1840-1900. These are available online; JSTOR, for instance, recently made everything in their archives from pre-1923 completely open-access.

I really can’t recommend this highly enough. In those days, many scientists were also excellent writers, and even formal papers were often written with clarity, style, and a liberal use of figurative language. Here is an excerpt from a paper (“The cockroach and its enemy“) published in The American Naturalist in 1867. The author, G. A. Perkins, is describing how a species of wasp stupefies a cockroach before laying eggs in its still-living body: