Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects

Malaria presents complex challenges for historians. In official mortality statistics in India in the nineteenth century, it was often placed within the broad and ambiguous category of ‘fevers’. Yet, it is one of the most distinctive diseases of the twentieth century, with clear diagnostic, ecological and cultural connotations. Rohan Deb Roy rejects the retrospective frames of malaria to approach it through fresh intellectual, cultural and political lenses. He has approached the ‘making and persistence of malaria as an enduring diagnostic category’ through the world of plants, drugs and vectors. His focus is on the ‘long nineteenth century’ (p.2), instead of the twentieth, which he observes has been better served by historians. The narrative of the book is woven around three distinct themes: the epidemiology of malaria, questions of purity and marketing of cinchona and quinine, and the identification of the mosquito vector. Historians have established that diseases such as malaria, cholera, yellow fever, sleeping sickness and plague operate within complex ecologies of germs, parasites, vectors, carriers and drugs or vaccines. Deb Roy places cinchona, quinine and mosquitoes within the singular category of ‘nonhumans’ to treat these as essential constituents in the making of malaria

Ancient history · Art · Biology · Empire · Geography · Literature · Malaria · Narrative · Plague (disease · Political science · Politics · Quinine · Sociology · Vector (molecular biology · Anthropology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research · History · Immunology · Law