Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy, Robert Sallares [reading a book TXT] 📗

far behind their contemporaries in other parts of the world, despite all the achievements of ancient Greek science. In ancient China a document written by Zuo Qiuming and dating to the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 ) records that a minister contracted malaria following an insect bite. Two other Chinese documents, dating to the Warring States period (476–221 ), state that malaria was caused by mosquito bites and often appeared in late summer or early autumn.¹¹ Similarly the connection between rats and bubonic plague was observed in China long before it was noticed in Europe. There are ancient Sanskrit texts from India which may also associate malaria with mosquito bites; however, these texts seem to be difficult to interpret and impossible to date.¹² Grmek convincingly argued that the concept of contagion or infection was rejected by ancient Greek and Roman medical writers because of its popular association with magic. Such associations were incompatible with the idea of a medicine based on rational thought, as the Hippocratic tradition required. Consequently there was no room in Hippocratic medicine for mosquito bites as a cause of ‘fever’ (puretÎß), which was instead attributed to an imbalance of the humours, especially by Galen. Pellegrin pointed out that nothing is known of popular thought in classical antiquity.¹³ Peasants might have had different ideas from the élite. It is interesting to bear in mind that Celli recorded that a connection between malaria and mosquitoes was frequently noticed by peasants in the Roman Campagna in the last century, at about the time when the modern scientific understanding of malaria was just commencing. Mario Coluzzi pointed out to the author the importance in the history of malariology of the Italian doctor Guiseppe Mendini, who in the original Italian version of his hygienic guide to Rome, published in 1896, worked out purely through logical arguments that malaria must be transmitted by mosquitoes, before Ronald Ross and Battista Grassi had ¹¹ Dong et al. (1996: 95–6).

¹² P. F. Russell (1955: 37–9) quotes the original Sanskrit; Futcher (1936: 541–2); Zysk (1985: 34–44); Raina (1991: 1–4); Zurbrigg (1994).

¹³ Grmek (1984), Nutton (1983), (1998), and (2000 a), and Leven (1993) on contagion; Pellegrin (1988).

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performed the laboratory experiments which proved it, in birds and in humans respectively.¹⁴ However, as far as antiquity is concerned, it is striking that even the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems, a very interesting work of unknown authorship, described ‘fever’

(puretÎß) as not infectious, even though the author(s) of this work took an interest in contagion that was uncommon in ancient medicine, describing fq≤siß (tuberculosis) and øfqalm≤a (trachoma?) as infectious.¹⁵ Cicero, following the view expressed centuries earlier in one of the works in the Hippocratic corpus, refused to accept that intermittent fevers were of divine origin just because of their periodicity.¹⁶ Nevertheless it is clear that some people did consider intermittent fevers to be of divine or rather demonic origin, since there was a temple of Dea Febris on the Palatine hill, reputedly the site of the original settlement of Rome by Romulus. This might be significant with regard to the question of the antiquity of the cult.¹⁷

There were also temples dedicated to this deity in at least two other sites in the city of Rome, according to Valerius Maximus: When they worship other deities, they expect to receive a benefit. However Fever is worshipped, so that she will cause less harm, in temples one of which is situated on the Palatine hill, a second in the vicinity of the monuments of Marius, and a third in the highest part of the Vicus Longus, and remedies which have been applied to the bodies of ill people are brought there.¹⁸

¹⁴ Celli (1900: 90), cf. Corti (1984: 660–1) on the various views about the aetiology of malaria held by early modern Italian peasants. Iliffe (1995: 58, 113) noted that some African peoples also associated malaria with mosquitoes.

¹⁵ [Aristotle] Problems 7.8.887a.

¹⁶ Hippocrates, On the sacred disease, ed. Littré (1839–61) vi. 354–5: oÈ pureto≥ oÈ åmfhmerino≥ ka≥ oÈ trita∏oi ka≥ oÈ tetarta∏oi oÛd†n ¬ssÎn moi dokvousin Èero≥ e”nai ka≥ ËpÏ qeoı g≤nesqai ta»thß t[ß no»sou [sc. epilepsy], —n oÛ qaumas≤wß πcwsi (Quotidian, tertian, and quartan fevers seem to me to be no less sacred and sent by god than this disease [sc. epilepsy], but no one wonders at them.); Cicero, de natura deorum 3.24: si omnes motus omniaque quae certis temporibus ordinem suum conservant divina dicimus, ne tertianas quoque febres et quartanas divinas esse dicendum sit, quarum reversione et motu quid potest esse constantius? (If we say that all movements and all phenomena that maintain their own order at set periodic intervals are divine, must we not declare that tertian and quartan fevers are also divine, for what is more regular than their recurrent cycle?) and 3.63: Febris enim fanum in Palatio (a shrine of Fever on the Palatine); Pliny, NH 2.5.16.

¹⁷ Lactantius, Inst. Div. 1.20.17, ed. Monat, in Sources Chrétiennes, 326 (1986), M. Minucius Felix, Octavius 25.8, and Seneca, Apocolocyntosis Divi Claudii 6 also mention Febris as a divinity.

Dumézil (1996: 230 and n. 40) regarded Febris as a demon, but noted that little is known about Roman demonology.

¹⁸ Valerius Maximus, factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri 2.5.6, ed. Combès (1995): Et ceteros quidem ad benefaciendum venerabantur. Febrem autem ad minus nocendum templis colebant, quorum [ cont. on p. 52]

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6. The Virgin of Fevers in the Sacristy of St. Peter’s in the Vatican in Rome. Reproduction of engraving by Pietro Leone Bombelli (1737–1809) in 1792. The Wellcome Library, London.

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Since most individual attacks of malaria in adulthood in endemic areas are not actually directly fatal (although overall life expectancy of the whole population is sharply reduced—see Ch. 5.

4 below), owing to acquired/inherited immunity, in practice many attempted ‘treatments’ in antiquity would have appeared to have been successful, even though they were in reality no better than