The country people were distrustful;
so-and-so had taken it for three or four days; he had improved, yes; but
the fever was on him once more. Why waste money on such experiments?
I remember accosting a lad, anemic, shivering with the tertian, and
marked by that untimely senility which is the sign-manual of malaria. I
suggested quinine.
"I don't take doctors' stuff," he said. "Even if I wanted to, my father
would not let me. And if he did, there's no money to pay for it. And if
there were, it would do no good. He's tried it himself."
"Well, but how are you feeling?"
"Oh, all right. There's nothing much the matter with me. Just the bad air."
Such types, too, are practically extinct nowadays; the people are being
educated to recognize their peril and how to avoid it; they begin to
follow Professor Celli's advice in the matter of regarding quinine as
their "daily bread." For since the discovery of the anophelic origin of
malaria many devices have been put into execution to combat the disease,
not the least of them being a popularized teaching of its causes and
consequences by means of pamphlets, lectures to school-children, and so
forth.
Now, you may either fight the anopheles - the vehicle, or the disease
itself. The first entails putting the country into such a state that the
mosquito finds it unpleasant to live there, a labour of Hercules. Yet
large sums are being expended in draining marshy tracts, regulating
river-beds and afforesting bare spaces; and if you are interested in
such works, you will do well to see what is going on at Metaponto at
this moment. (A considerable portion of the Government grant for these
purposes has lately been deflected for use in the Tripolitan war.)
Exemplary fines are also imposed for illicit timber-cutting and
grazing, - in those towns, at least, where the magistrate has sufficient
sense to perceive the ulterior benefits to be derived from what
certainly entails a good deal of temporary hardship on poor people.
Certain economic changes are helping in this work; so the wealth
imported from America helps to break up the big properties, those
latifundia which, says an Italian authority, "are synonymous with
malaria." The ideal condition - the extirpation of anophelines - will
never be attained; nor is it of vital importance that it should be.
Far more pressing is the protection of man against their attacks.
Wonderful success has crowned the wire-netting of the windows - an
outcome of the classical experiments of 1899, in the Roman Campagna.
But chiefest and most urgent of all is the cure of the infected
population. In this direction, results astonishing - results well-nigh
incredible - have attended the recently introduced governmental sale of
quinine. In the year 1895 there were 16,464 deaths from malaria
throughout Italy. By 1908 the number had sunk to 3463. Eloquent figures,
that require no comment! And, despite the fact that the drug is now sold
at a merely nominal rate or freely given away to the needy - nay, thrust
down the very throats of the afflicted peasantry by devoted gentlemen
who scour the plains with ambulances during the deadly season - despite
this, the yearly profits from its sale are amounting to about
three-quarters of a million francs.
So these forlorn regions are at last beginning to revive.
And returning to Foca, of whose dreadful condition up to 1902 (year of
the introduction of Government quinine) I have just spoken, we find that
a revolution has taken place. Between that year and 1908 the birth-rate
more than doubled the death-rate. In 1908 some two hundred poor folks
frequented the ambulance, nearly six kilogrammes of quinine being
gratuitously distributed; not one of the natives of the place was
attacked by the disease; and there was a single death - an old woman of
eighty, who succumbed to senile decay. [Footnote: Doctor Genovese's
statistical investigations have brought an interesting little fact to
light. In the debilitating pre-quinine period there was a surplus of
female births; now, with increased healthfulness, those of the males
preponderate.]
This is an example of what the new quinine-policy has done for Italy, in
briefest space of time. Well may the nation be proud of the men who
conceived this genial and beneficial measure and carried it through
Parliament, and of those local doctors without whose enlightened zeal
such a triumph could not have been achieved. . . .
Sir Ronald Ross's discovery, by the way, has been fruitful not only in
practical humanitarian results. For instance, it has reduced North's
laborious "Roman Fever" to something little better than a curiosity. And
here, on these deserted shores that were once resplendent with a great
civilization - here is the place to peruse Mr. W. M. Jones's studies on
this subject. I will not give even the shortest precis of his
conscientious researches nor attempt to picture their effect upon a mind
trained in the old school of thought; suffice to say, that the author
would persuade us that malaria is implicated, to an hitherto unsuspected
extent, in the decline of ancient Greece and Rome. And he succeeds. Yes;
a man accustomed to weigh evidence will admit, I think, that he has made
out a suggestively strong case.
How puzzled we were to explain why the brilliant life of Magna Graecia
was snuffed out suddenly, like a candle, without any appreciably
efficient cause - how we listened to our preachers cackling about the
inevitable consequences of Sybaritic luxury, and to the warnings of sage
politicians concerning the dangers of mere town-patriotism as opposed to
worthier systems of confederation! How we drank it all in! And how it
warmed the cockles of our hearts to think that we were not vicious,
narrow-minded heathens, such as these!
And now a vulgar gnat is declared to be at the bottom of the whole mystery.
