– by Wood Institute travel grantee Urmi Engineer Willoughby*
It is difficult to pinpoint the presence of the disease presently called “malaria” in early America because of the inconsistent terminology used by doctors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This is partially because the symptoms of malaria, which include fever, headache, chills, muscle aches, nausea, jaundice, vomiting, and general malaise, resembled other common diseases such as yellow fever, typhoid fever, and influenza. For much of the nineteenth century, doctors in Europe and North America referred to the disease using descriptive terms that indicated observed symptoms and environmental factors. The most distinctive features of malaria are its periodicity and alternating of chills and fever, evident in the medical term “intermittent fever,” the more common “fever and ague,” and more specific terms that identified the intervals between attacks of fever (quotidian, tertian, and quartan fever).