Mosquito-malaria theory
Although Johnson's hypothesis was forgotten, the arrival and validation of the germ theory of diseases in the late 19th century began to shed new lights.
[1] When Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran discovered that malaria was caused by a protozoan parasite in 1880, the miasma theory began to subside.
[15] The first record of argument against the miasmatic nature of malaria was from Irish-American surgeon John Crawford, who wrote an article "Mosquital Origin of Malarial Disease" in Baltimore Observer in 1807,[16] but it provoked no consequences.
[17] An American physician, Charles Earl Johnson, provided a systematic and elaborate arguments against miasmatic origin of malaria in 1851 before the Medical Society of North Carolina.
A German physician Johann Heinrich Meckel was the first to observed in 1847 the protozoan parasites which he recognised only as black pigment granules from the blood and spleen of a patient who died of malaria.
[20][21][22] A major discovery was made by a French Army physician Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran working in Algeria, North Africa.
The scientific clue emerged when a British medical officer Patrick Manson discovered for the first time that parasites were transmitted by mosquitoes.
[5][33] Based on the report of Manson's discovery, an American physician Albert Freeman Africanus King developed a proposition that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes.
Unfettered he developed the theory with proper justifications and presented it before the Philosophical Society of Washington on 10 February 1882, under the title "The Prevention of Malarial Disease Illustrating inter alia the Conservative Function of Ague".
[6] His idea was ridiculed as inconceivable as scientist still believed malarial parasite was spread through inhalation or ingestion from air (still not far from the miasma theory).
[4] He did not give up, and instead formed a more elaborate argument which he published as a 15-page article in the September 1883 issue of The Popular Science Monthly,[34][35] making an introduction as:[36] I now propose to present a series of facts... with regard to the so-called “malarial poison,” and to show how they may be explicable by the supposition that the mosquito is the real source of the disease, rather than the inhalation or cutaneous of a marsh-vapor.King carefully selected his view in 19 points.
[37][38] To paraphrase his lengthy arguments: occurrence of malaria always coincided with conditions that are also ideal for mosquitos, such as in the time of day, geographical area, temperature, and climate.
[5] He strongly supported Laveran's germ theory of malaria, which was not yet completely embraced by the entire medical community of the time.
But fortunately he met a British army surgeon Ronald Ross, who was on vacation while serving in the Indian Medical Service in India.
The necessary experiments cannot for obvious reasons be carried out in England, but I would commend my hypothesis to the attention of medical men in India and elsewhere, where malarial patients and suctorial insects abound.
His volunteer at the London School of Tropical Medicine, P. Thurburn Manson gave a detailed account of his malarial fevers and treatment after bitten by the mosquitoes.
