The flea, the louse, the bedbug, the house fly,
the mosquito, the tick, have all within a few years taken their places
as important transmitters of disease. The fly population may be taken
as the sanitary index of a place. The discovery, too, that insects are
porters of disease has led to a great extension of our knowledge of
their life history. Early in the nineties, when Dr. Thayer and I were
busy with the study of malaria in Baltimore, we began experiments on
the possible transmission of the parasites, and a tramp, who had been
a medical student, offered himself as a subject. Before we began, Dr.
Thayer sought information as to the varieties of mosquitoes known in
America, but sought in vain: there had at that time been no systematic
study. The fundamental study which set us on the track was a
demonstration by Patrick Manson,(3) in 1879, of the association of
filarian disease with the mosquito. Many observations had already
been made, and were made subsequently, on the importance of insects as
intermediary hosts in the animal parasites, but the first really great
scientific demonstration of a widespread infection through insects was
by Theobald Smith, now of Harvard University, in 1889, in a study of
Texas fever of cattle.
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