It was
sold at a prohibitive price. 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.
