I have a book coming out next year about the effect of insects on human history. As you might imagine, malaria figures into the book pretty heavily, as it’s been a terrible scourge of a disease since ancient times. And of course it is vectored by a certain species of mosquito. I wanted to show [...]
malaria
Famous victims of malaria include Genghis Khan, Dante Alighieri, and Oliver Cromwell.
I was helping my middle schooler study for his big American History test a few days ago, which focused on westward expansion in the early nineteenth century—you know, Manifest Destiny, the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, and including events leading to the Civil War and then the Civil War itself. (It was a big test.) [...]
As part of my research for my new book about insects, I’ve been reading a lot about malaria prophylaxis (that is, preventing malaria). For centuries, cinchona powder was the only known successful treatment for malaria. It was made from the ground-up bark of a cinchona tree, which was discovered growing in the foothills of the [...]