The Mosquito Read online

  In the heart of the ancient world, centered on Mesopotamia, imperialism in some form has existed since the dawn of agronomy around 8500 BCE at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers near the ancient city of Qurnah (300 miles southeast of Baghdad and the purported site of the Garden of Eden). Agricultural pursuits fostered the emergence of the first Sumerian city-states around 4000 BCE, while also allowing a relatively isolated Egypt to flourish on the banks of the Nile. Throughout history, great empires expanded through imperialism, conquest, and political or economic leverage. Each was defeated in time and replaced by another, continuing a cyclical rise and fall of ancient kingdoms.

  The Agricultural Revolution led to the creation of modern city-states, drastically increasing populations, and more importantly for the spread of contagion, escalating population densities. By 2500 BCE, some cities in the Middle East topped 20,000 inhabitants. The advent of farming led to a surplus of crops and an accumulation of wealth. Greed is a powerful stimulus. This innate human lust for prosperity and power led to complex social stratification, local economic specialization, sophisticated and tiered spiritual, legal, and political structures, and most significantly, to trade. Statistically, throughout history, societies that were engaged in elevated trade also had a higher propensity for war. Political power and military might were wielded through the accumulation of wealth, which was chained to commerce and control of vital ports, trade routes, and transportation choke points. The reality of economics is quite simple: Why trade when you can invade? The success or failure of early empires in their drive for territorial expansion and wealth largely rested on the mosquito.

  Inside the ancient Mediterranean compass, just as the malaria-mosquito axis shaped our very DNA, the mosquito also assembled the historical chromosomes of civilization itself. With reckless abandon, “General Anopheles” razed armies and decided the outcome of countless course-altering wars. Just as the Russians had “General Winter” during the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War, General Anopheles has been a fertile and rapacious guerrilla force throughout the history of warfare and in the creation of nations and empires. She plays the role of mercenary, alternating between friend and foe. As we will see, she does not pick sides but attacks indiscriminate targets of opportunity, with one side usually benefiting from the other’s suffering. With industrial farming penetrating global landscapes and giving rise to budding empires, the mosquito became the destroyer of worlds. Ancient scribes of these early agrarian societies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India documented—through symptomatic descriptions of disease—the mosquito’s projection of power across antiquity.

  Theirs was a world stalked by mysterious disease and death. Within the physical and psychological world our ancestors moved through, sicknesses and suffering were an uncanny, supernatural, terrifying specter. As English philosopher Thomas Hobbes announced in his 1651 treatise, Leviathan, humankind “is naturally punished with diseases; rashness, with mischances; injustice, with violence of enemies; pride, with ruin; cowardice, with oppression; and rebellion, with slaughter . . . and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Imagine for a moment: What if this dark, ominous, terrifying, and apocalyptic apparition morosely espoused by Hobbes was your everyday reality? Our predecessors were operating under, and interpreting from, a wholly foreign and superstitious concept of illness. They were adrift in uncharted waters within a worldview governed by mysticism, miracles, and the wrath of gods.

  The ancients looked to the elements of earth, water, air, and fire for answers, and beheld their vengeful deities as a cause of disease, suffering, and death. They prayed and sacrificed to these very same smiting spirits to end their sufferings, annul their tormenting symptoms, and forgive them their trespasses. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, for us to summon a world without scientific reason, deficient in concrete cause-and-effect relationships, and deprived of prevention and treatment for most diseases. “But for the moment,” invokes J. R. McNeill, “we must recognize how unusual the last century has been for human health, and for our human ability to bend the rest of the biosphere to our will—within limits and not without unintended consequences—and remember that it was not always so.”

  To be fair, our ancient ancestors did experiment with organic treatments, as we have seen, and, quite shrewdly, even scratched the surface of exposing the true cause of mosquito-borne diseases. The established medical consensus, known as the miasma theory, attributed most diseases to noxious fumes, particles, or simply “bad air” leaching and misting from stagnant water, marshes, and swamps. This reasoning was so tantalizingly close to unmasking the real culprit, the mosquito that dwelled and multiplied in these very same bodies of water at blame. But close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, or so the saying goes. To better understand their ailments and the workings of their biological world, our ancient ancestors did document the symptoms of numerous diseases, including those messengered by mosquitoes.

  Decrypting diseases in this deep historical record, however, is daunting. Ancient chronicles usually reference fevers, but given the embryonic state of medical knowledge before Louis Pasteur’s revolutionary germ theory in the 1850s, descriptions are vague, lacking in specifics and, unquestionably, in cause. Most illnesses are accompanied by a fever, including cholera and typhoid, both of which were relatively generic. Thankfully, the diseases themselves provide some help in decoding documented plagues and pestilence throughout our past.

  The symptoms of filariasis and yellow fever are unmistakable and are generally authenticated by our earliest scribes. Fever-producing malarias, however, are more problematic to isolate from other diseases, yet they, too, leave us with clues as to their historical whereabouts and implications. Of the five human malaria parasites, the deadly falciparum and the rare newcomer knowlesi start with a twenty-four-hour fever cycle of chills, high fever, and profuse sweating, meaning that the fever peaks once a day. Historically, this was referred to as quotidian fever. These two types of malaria then join the ovale and vivax strains by settling into a forty-eight-hour fever schedule dubbed tertian fever. Malariae adheres to a seventy-two-hour regimen referenced as quartan fever.* All malarial attacks also produce a visibly distended spleen. This begs mention, for if the reporter, like the famed Greek physician Hippocrates or his Roman successor Galen, was savvy enough to include details about the behavior of the fever itself, then, along with other archeological evidence, including skeletal remains, the shroud of mystery can be lifted to reveal the mosquito at work.

  The earliest written endorsement of a mosquito-borne disease dates to 3200 BCE. These Sumerian tablets, unearthed from the “cradle of civilization” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers of ancient Mesopotamia, unquestionably describe malarious fevers attributed to Nergal, the Babylonian god of the underworld, depicted as a mosquito-like insect. The Canaanite and Philistine god Beelzebub (lord of the flies or insects) was reflected in the devil of early Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The evil demons of the ancient fire-worshipping Zoroastrians clustered in Persia and the Caucasus were represented as flies and mosquitoes, as was Baal, the Chaldean spirit of sickness. Hobbes borrowed his ominous incarnation of Leviathan from the Hebrew (and Christian) scriptures of the Old Testament, where the sea monster Leviathan spreads evil and disorder by stirring up the waters of chaos. This Leviathan character sure sounds an awful lot like our own sprightly mosquito, who has dined on mayhem and bedlam across history. Even today, the fictional portrayal of the Christian devil, with its bloodred wings, probing horns, and sweeping pointed tail, conjures lingering insect-like visions.

  Malaria—“Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him”: A Chinese antimalaria poster mimicking the death rider of the Pale Horse from the Book of Revelation alerting the public that “Prevention means killing the mosquito; frightening diseased mosquito carries hell
to planet Earth and spreads epidemic disease.” (U.S. National Library of Medicine)

  The Old Testament frequently depicts divine judgments as plagues of insects and their deadly pestilence. Sickness was wrought by a vengeful god upon its disobedient subjects or their enemies, chiefly the Egyptians and Philistines. As part of their spoils of war after defeating the Israelites at the Battle of Ebenezer around 1130 BCE, for example, the Philistines seized the Ark of the Covenant. Vengeance was served by smiting the Philistines with devastating afflictions until the Ark was returned to its rightful owners. As I write, my mind is projecting the final scene of the 1981 movie Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark when God unleashes phantom angels of death upon the plundering Nazis for unsealing the Ark. Of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse outlined in the Book of Revelation, the rider of the pale horse was Death, who had authority “to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.”

  The Bible is one of the most studied and scrutinized texts in the world, and yet experts from across academic fields, including epidemiology, theology, linguistics, archeology, and history, cannot positively identify the exact causes or diseases that consume the Old Testament. The general consensus among scholars is that malaria or plagues of mosquitoes are mentioned at least four times, one of which is the destruction of the Assyrian army under King Sennacherib in 701 BCE, lifting the siege of Jerusalem. This event was later immortalized in Lord Byron’s rousing 1815 poem.* The romantic politician and poet died of malarial fever in 1824 while fighting the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire. Shortly before his death at thirty-six, Byron conceded that “I staid [sic] out too late for this malaria season.”

  We do know, however, that malaria, and possibly filariasis, already had a strong foothold in Egypt and across the Middle East during and after the presumed Exodus around 1225 BCE. Based on reliefs carved into Egyptian funeral temples at Thebes, now Luxor’s Valley of the Kings, and subsequent descriptions left by both ancient Persian and Indian observers, there is evidence to suggest that filariasis first engorged humanity as early as 1500 BCE. Residual evidence of malaria was recently confirmed in 9,000-year-old bones from the Neolithic town of Catalhoyuk in southern Turkey, and in Egyptian and Nubian remains as old as 5,200 years, including King Tutankhamen (Tut). The death of eighteen-year-old King Tut from falciparum malaria in 1323 BCE marked the beginning of the end of Egyptian imperial power and cultural achievement.* Never again was Egypt an esteemed international player.

  In the Valley of the Kings: the mosquito among the hieroglyphs on the Temple of Ramesses III in Luxor, Egypt. The construction of the temple around 1175 BCE coincided with the invasions of the “Sea People” and the collapse of the early micro-empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt. (Shutterstock Images)

  The unification of Egyptian city-states and agricultural expansion from the Nile River delta began around 3100 BCE. Given its geographic isolation and austere desert surroundings, Egypt was a minor player in the higher echelons of external geopolitical affairs. While the Egyptians invaded the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, bringing them into conflict with the Israelites and others, they never secured a lasting foothold. Early Egyptian civilization generally evolved outside of the perpetual imperial political and military concerns to the east. Essentially, Egypt was an empire unto itself, reaching its territorial and cultural zenith during the era known as the New Kingdom from 1550 to 1070 BCE, noted for some of the most well-known pharaohs, including Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, Ramesses II, and Tutankhamen. Over the next two hundred years, Egyptian territorial holdings, wealth, and influence markedly diminished. Egypt ultimately became a vassal state for a series of conquering empires, beginning with the Libyans around 1000 BCE, followed by Cyrus the Great’s Persians, Alexander’s Greeks, and Augustus Caesar’s Romans.

  Predating the malarious mummy of King Tut by a millennium, malaria or “swamp fever” is also mentioned in the earliest Egyptian papyrus medical text of 2200 BCE. The renowned fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus tells us Egyptians battled “against the mosquitoes, being in great numbers, these are the means they have invented: the towers are of service to those who inhabit the upper parts of the marshes, and ascending into them, they sleep there; for the mosquitoes, on account of the winds, are not able to fly high. But those who live around the marshes have invented other means instead of towers. Every man of them possesses a casting-net, with which, during the day, he catches fish, and at night he makes use of it in the bed where he reposes, round which he places the net, and then having crept under it, he sleeps. But the mosquitoes, if he sleeps wrapped up in a woolen or linen garment, bite through these, but through the net they do not even attempt to bite.” He also reveals that the prevailing Egyptian practice for treating malarial fevers was to bathe in fresh human urine. Having never contracted malaria, I can only assume that its symptoms are so unbearably severe that a pampering soak in sparkling, steaming urine issuing from your thoughtful and upstanding servants is worth a shot for some well-deserved relief.

  Ancient Chinese records, including the famed Nei Ching (Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine, 400–300 BCE), clearly distinguish the ebb-and-flow fever patterns of the various types of malaria and articulate the enlargement of the spleen. It was believed that the symptoms of “the mother of all fevers” were brought on by disturbances of chi (energy force) and the balance between yin and yang (dark and light dualism of the natural world), concepts seemingly borrowed by Star Wars creator and guru George Lucas. Malaria was represented in Chinese folklore and medical texts by a demonic trio, with each evil spirit signifying a stage of the fever cycle. The demon of chills was armed with a bucket of ice water, the subsequent fever demon stoked a blazing fire, and the ensuing demon of perspiration and pounding headaches holstered a sledgehammer.

  The grip of these malarial demons is recounted in legend when a Chinese emperor asked his most trusted emissary to pacify and become governor of an outlying southern province. The ambassador thanked the emperor and began preparing himself for his new post. When the time came to leave, however, he refused to go, stating that his purpose meant certain death as the province in question was teeming with malaria. He was quickly beheaded by his enraged ruler.

  Ssu-ma Ch’ien, considered the father of Chinese historical writing for his Records of the Grand Historian (94 BCE), confirms that “in the area south of the Yangtze the land is low and the climate humid; adult males die young.” Accordingly, in ancient China, men traveling to the malarious south arranged for their wives’ remarriage before departing. Award-winning historian William H. McNeill reveals, “Another mosquito-borne disease, dengue fever, which is closely related to yellow fever though not as lethal . . . also affects southern parts of China. Like malaria, dengue fever may have been present from time immemorial, lying in wait for immigrants from more northerly climes . . . such afflictions mattered a good deal in the early centuries of Chinese expansion . . . probably among the major obstacles to Chinese penetration southwards.” This unequal burden of disease plagued economic development in southern China for centuries, leaving it stagnant and lagging far behind the prosperous north.

  The commercial disparity between north and south imparted by endemic malaria, with looming future ramifications, was mirrored in other countries, such as Italy, Spain, and the United States, and was often referred to as the “Southern Question” or the “Southern Problem.” Malaria, according to an early-twentieth-century Italian politician, “has the most serious social consequences. Fever destroys the capacity to work, annihilates energy, and renders a people sluggish and indifferent. Inevitably, therefore, malaria stunts productivity, wealth and well-being.” For Americans, the mosquito’s uneven geographic economic impact would eventually engulf the United States in the momentous issues of slavery and civil war.

  Indian medical texts also mention the differing malarial fevers by 1500 BCE. The “king of diseases�
�� was personified by the fiery fever demon Takman, who arises from lightning during the rainy season. Not only did Indians recognize that water was somehow affiliated with mosquitoes, they also seem to have been the first to identify mosquitoes as the source of malaria. In his detailed sixth-century BCE compendium on medicine, Indian physician Sushruta singled out five mosquito species of the northern Indus River Valley: “Their bite is as painful as that of a serpent, and causes diseases . . . accompanied by fever, pain of limbs, hair standing on end, pain, vomiting, diarrhea, thirst, heat, giddiness, yawning, shivering, hiccups, burning sensations, intense cold.” He also alludes to an enlarged spleen, “which distends the left side, is as hard as stone, and is arched like the back of a turtle.” While he suspected the mosquito as a vector for disease, medical practitioners, scientists, and the casual observer lacked scientific evidence until recently, so the theory remained just that, a theory. Dr. Sushruta’s astute reasoning and keen observations went unheeded for millennia.

  The mosquito’s influence and impact travel unregulated and unfettered across the historical space-time continuum. The agricultural expansion of Bantu yam farmers in Africa 8,000 years ago was a link in the chain of African chattel slavery, and also led directly to Ryan Clark’s near-death experience following his participation in an NFL football game in Denver in 2007. “We are not makers of history,” conceded the esteemed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “We are made by history.” The mosquito prods our human journey along its uncharted course and stimulates our swing through time in mysterious, if not macabre, ways. She connects historical, at times seemingly unrelated, events separated by distance, epochs, and space. Hers is a long and warped reach.