Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment in Africa and North America

Chapter 2: On Biomedicine, Transfers of Knowledge, and MalariaTreatments in Eastern North America and Tropical Africa

Chapter 2 On Biomedicine, Transfers of Knowledge, and Malaria Treatments in Eastern North America and Tropical Africa James L. A. Webb, Jr. During the early years of the “Columbian Exchange,” malaria parasites crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the bloodstreams of European colonists and African captives. In the Americas, anopheline mosquitoes took blood meals from these immigrants and proved biologically capable of hosting the parasites. The infected mosquitoes then took blood meals from noninfected individuals and spread malaria to them. This introduction of malaria in the Americas was far less spectacular in its initial demographic impact than the first waves of smallpox and measles that killed large numbers of Native Americans. Over time, however, malaria became an endemic disease in the New World and at least by the nineteenth century had become the principal disease burden of eastern North America. This relatively rapid integration of European and tropical African malarial zones in the Americas stands in sharp contrast to the lack of disease integration between the European and the tropical African malarial zones in the Old World. There, the European and North African mosquito vectors were less efficient in transmitting malaria, and they were unable to host the genotypes of the falciparum malaria parasites of tropical Africa below the Sahara. The result was that malaria in tropical Africa remained particularly deadly 54 | James L. A. Webb, Jr. to nonimmune Europeans, and this epidemiological barrier prevented the colonization of tropical Africa before the late nineteenth century.1 Treatment of malaria was a major concern for the African and European societies that suffered the infections. During the first era of European exploration, conquest, and colonial rule (1450–1800), as Europeans encountered new disease environments, they sought to expand their knowledge of the flora of the wider world. One of the principal motivations was the quest for medically useful plants.2 In the late sixteenth century, the Spaniards learned that the bark of the cinchona tree that grew wild on the eastern slopes of the Andes was effective in treating malaria, and cinchona bark slowly entered the Western medical practice as the first disease-specific drug in the materia medica. This remedy, however, remained relatively scarce and expensive before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and thus beyond the means of most sufferers.3 This essay develops a framework for considering the transfers of knowledge about malaria treatments that took place between European Americans and Native Americans in eastern North America and between Europeans and Africans in tropical Africa. It considers the nature of premodern therapeutic systems, the different malarial environments of eastern North America and tropical Africa, and the broad contexts in which the transfers of knowledge about malaria treatments may be understood. PremodernTherapeutic Systems Premodern therapeutic systems appear to have shared two metaelements . The first was a broad distinction between two fundamental categories of illnesses: one that was caused by interventions from the spirit world, and one that was “natural.”4 The idea of a category of disease linked to the spirit world appears to be anciently rooted in our deep human past, a part of our common inheritance of a worldview shaped by animism.5 This worldview likely traveled with the earliest migrants out of Africa into Eurasia and the Americas, and the need to intervene in the spirit world became a foundational element of healing cultures around the world. This category of spirit-induced illness persists today in “modern ” cultures, in several modalities of belief about the spiritual dimensions of disease.6 By contrast, the second category of diseases included those that were unexceptional and relatively mild. They were generally accepted as mundane conditions of life. The second meta-element was a broad distinction between two categories of therapies. The first category was based upon the use of behavior On Biomedicine, Transfers of Knowledge, and Malaria Treatments | 55 modifications,dietary restrictions,and/or biomedicines that were prepared from plants or animal products. This biomedical knowledge was a blend of empirical observations, imputations, and beliefs about the biophysical effects of behavior change and remedies based on plant and animal products . The relief that some sufferers of common ailments and conditions gained from palliative treatment or practical cure validated the therapeutics . The second therapeutic category was of ritual, spiritual interventions to effect cures. Shamanist specialists who possessed occult knowledge typically carried out these interventions. The boundaries between categories of disease and categories of therapy were mutable. Some “simple” or...