fever'n'ague / malaria
ague: Chilliness; a chill, or state of shaking with cold, though in ordinary health. An intermittent fever, attended by alternate cold and hot fits. (Webster, 1882)
malaria: Bad air; air tainted by deleterious emanation from animal or vegetable matter; especially, noxious exhalations of marshy districts, capable of causing fever or other disease; miasma. (Webster, 1882)
No one knew, in those days, that fever'n'ague was malaria, and that some mosquitoes give it to people when they bite them. – Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 15, "Fever'n'Ague"
Malaria is transmitted by the female Anopheles mosquito. Only female mosquitoes can transmit the disease, and they must have been infected through a blood meal taken from an infected person. Malaria is caused by a parasite; four kinds of malaria parasites can infect humans: Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae.
Once transmitted to a person, the parasites travel to the liver, where they grow and multiply. During this "incubation period," the infected person has no symptoms. After as few as eight days or as long as several months, the parasites leave the liver cells and enter red blood cells. Once in the cells, they continue to grow and multiply. After they mature, the infected red blood cells rupture, freeing the parasites to attack and enter other red blood cells. Toxins released when the red cells burst are what cause the typical fever, chills, and flu-like malaria symptoms.
For most people, symptoms begin ten days to four weeks after infection, although a person may feel ill as early as seven days or as late as an entire year later. Two kinds of malaria, P. vivax and P. ovale, can relapse. In P. vivax and P. ovale infections, some parasites can remain dormant in the liver for several months up to about four years after a person is bitten by an infected mosquito. When these parasites come out of hibernation and begin invading red blood cells, the person will become sick.
The Ingallses took quinine to treat malaria. Quinine destroys the Plasmodium parasite when taken internally. Quinine is a drug made from the dried bark of the Cinchona tree, specifically Cinchona officinalis and several other species in the genus Cinchona.
The potent ingredient in the bark is the alkaloid quinine. It wasn't until 1820 that quinine was isolated from the bark of the Cinchona tree, although it had been used to treat malaria for hundreds of years prior to that time. Aside from the treatment of malaria, quinine has also been used to treat leg cramps, as a flavoring, and it provides the bitter taste in tonic water. In fact, "gin and tonic" was originally (and successfully!) consumed in the past to prevent attacks of malaria.
Quinine is rarely prescribed for the treatment of malaria today, as it has been replaced by synthetic drugs. But when studying Little House on the Prairie in the classroom, make sure you have a bottle of tonic water so that children can taste the bitterness of quinine.
DDT and Malaria. Statistics show that malaria was a major problem a dozen years after the Ingalls
family suffered from it in Indian Territory; "malarious areas" included the
entire east coast and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies. Although
DDT had first been produced in the laboratory in 1874, it wasn't until 1939
(four years after the publication of Little House on the Prairie) that
its insecticidal properties were discovered.
In the summer of 1947, the
National Malaria Eradication Program began spraying DDT on the interior walls of
rural homes and buildings in areas where malaria had been a problem in recent
years. By 1949, almost five million homes had been treated, and the country was
declared to be free of malaria as a significant health problem. 
But
while DDT killed everything with six or eight legs, it also proved deadly to
animals up the food chain, including songbirds and raptors. By 1972, DDT was totally banned in the United States. Songbirds resumed
their singing, and malaria went back to killing people, especially those in
poorer countries.
Although Mrs.
Scott and the rest of the squatters in Indian Territory thought "fever'n'ague"
was caused by eating watermelons or exposure to the night air, some of the other
guesses as to its origin are equally interesting today. An article published in
1872 reports that malaria was caused "by a chemical decomposition of impurities
emanating from our own bodies, which circulating in the atmosphere and brought
into contact with the blood, produce an abnormal change in the blood by
disorganizing the venous and arterial systems." Another theory was that "spores
of microscopic plants, living in the atmosphere, being of a greater specific
gravity than that of the atmosphere, fall to the cellars and lower portions of
buildings and breed in the moist filth there. Exposure to these organisms causes
the disease."
Chills and Fever. The following is recommended as a cure for fever and ague, which now prevails so generally in some parts of the city and adjoining places. It is a Yankee notion, and appeared first in a Connecticut paper:-- "Take a teaspoonful of finely pulverized egg shells, mixed with molasses, on going to bed, after soaking the feet in warm water. Two or three doses often cure." / Whether the above is a remedy or not, we cannot tell, but we do
know a friend who was cured of the shakes by taking, in the early morning, a whole nutmeg, grated into a glass containing the juice of one lemon. He had only to take it two mornings and he was cured; perhaps it would not have cured another person, but we know it did him." — Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine LXXXII (May 1871), 481.
