TURAL PRODUCTION OF MALARIA, AND THE MEANS OF MAKING
MALARIAL COUNTRIES HEALTHIER.

[Footnote: An Address delivered at the Eighth Session of the International
Medical Congress, Copenhagen, August 12, 1884.]

By Conrad Tommasi Crudeli, M.D., Professor of Hygiene, University of Rome,
Italy.

Before entering upon my subject, I must crave the indulgence of those of
my colleagues whose language I have borrowed for any italicisms that I may
use, as well as for the foreign accent which must strike their ears more
or less disagreeably. Desiring to respond as well as lay in my power to
the invitation with which I have been honored to discuss the hygienic
questions relating to malaria, I have chosen the French language as being
the one in which, apart from my mother tongue, I could express myself with
the greatest ease and precision.

I shall be pardoned also, I hope, for having employed the terms "malaria"
and "malarial districts" in place of the more commonly used expressions
"paludal miasm" (_miasme paludeen_) and "marshy regions" (_contrees
marecageuses_). The substitution is not a happy one from a literary point
of view, but I have made it deliberately and for the following reason: The
idea that intermittent and pernicious fevers are engendered by putrid
emanations from swamps and marshes is one of those semi-scientific
assumptions which have contributed most to lead astray the investigations
of scientists and the work of public administrations. This idea, so
widespread and so well established by the traditions of the school, is
radically false. The specific ferment which engenders those fevers by its
accumulation in the atmosphere which we breathe is not exclusively of
paludal origin, and still less is it a product of putrefaction. Indeed, in
every region of the globe between the two Arctic circles there are swamps
and marshes, steeping-tanks of hemp and flax, large deltas where salt and
fresh waters mix, and yet there is no malaria there, although putrid
decomposition is on every side. On the other hand, in the same parts of
the globe there are places which are not and never were marshy, and in
which there is not the least trace of putrefaction, but which,
nevertheless, produce malaria in abundance. I reject, therefore, wholly
the paludal assumption, and in order to express this view in the title of
my paper, have been forced to employ terms which to my hearers may sound
like italicisms.

The Italians generally have