"Wonders unconceived": reflections on the birth of medical entomology.

Prior to Patrick Manson's discovery in 1877 that the mosquito Culex fatigans was the intermediate host of filariasis, the association of insects with disease and the nature of disease transmission was almost entirely speculation. Manson's work was incomplete, however, because it showed the manner in which the mosquito acquired the infection from humans, but failed to show the way in which the mosquito passed the infection to humans. That pathogens were transmitted by the bite of an infected female mosquito was later proven experimentally with bird malaria by Manson's protégé, Ronald Ross. In 1898 Ross demonstrated that the infective stage of the malarial parasite was injected into the host when the mosquito released saliva into the wound prior to injesting blood. Insects were suspected as carriers of disease for centuries, yet it was not until the late 1870s that the uncritical acceptance of folk beliefs was supplanted by research-based scientific medicine. Why did it take so long? The answer lies in the fact that early medicine itself was imprecise and could not have pursued the subject with any hope of useful results until the last quarter of the 19th century. A better understanding of the nature of the disease process (germ theory of disease) and improved technology (microscopes and oil-immersion lenses with greater resolving power, and synthetic tissue stains) were indispensable for revealing the nexus between those partners in crime: insects and parasites.

Entomology in translation: interpreting French medical entomological knowledge in colonial Mali.

This essay examines how knowledge and practices around entomology and parasitology travelled and the consequences of their mobility. In exploring three anti-malaria campaigns in French Soudan before 1960, it argues that the history of medical entomology's travels entailed multiple temporal, spatial, social translations that African medical personnel, intellectuals, healers, and farmers in French Soudan reinterpreted, appropriated, and sometimes wholly rejected. This essay also focuses on "erroneous" translations, detailing how and why middle class medical personnel and intellectuals interpreted and reformulated farmers' and healers' diagnostic categories that may or may not be malaria. Anti-mosquito and antilarval interventions, and more generally anti-malaria interventions, influenced how African colonial subjects and health workers understood certain vectors and of certain maladies. These understandings, in turn, shaped the consequences of subsequent public health measures. Histories of translated parasitological and entomological knowledge and etiologies of illness have critical implications for contemporary malaria control efforts: interventions to reduce malaria transmission through various kinds of entomological controls that require active participation of local populations cannot be effective if all participants cannot agree upon what is being controlled or prevented.