Artemisia Annua, Artemisinin, ACTS & Malaria Control in Africa: Tradition, Science and Public Policy by Dana G. Dalrymple (review)

If you are planning to do research in malaria control, or want to know what the current state of knowledge is, especially concerning modern efforts, the book Artemisia Annua, Artemisinin, ACTS & Malaria Control in Africa: Tradition, Science and Public Policy, by Dana G. Dalrymple, is indispensible. The indefatigable author provides key information from more than one thousand sources and adds innumerable insights along the way. But this is not an easy read, nor one for the general reader of history. It is basically a book-length bibliographical essay. It is organized in a way that may make sense for researchers or even policy makers but is somewhat off-putting: while not every paragraph has a number and heading, it often feels that way (e.g., “1.5.2.1.1. Research” followed by “1.5.2.1.2. Subsides” and then “1.5.2.2. Balancing Supply and Demand,” etc.). This setup is very difficult for general readers, including this one. The same holds true for the author putting all the references in the body of the text (not as footnotes or endnotes), which sometimes means that most of a paragraph is made up of citations. To state the bottom line, this book will be a “must” for a select group of people, but not most readers of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.