Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (review)

It takes a brave and learned scholar to undertake a “global history of malaria.” It is a history that antedates the written word and extends into the twenty-first century. It is a narrative of nature and culture, of center and periphery, of microclimates and immune mechanisms. It is a complicated history indeed and by its nature interdisciplinary. This book is part of an environmental history series, but it demonstrates the ultimate elusiveness of that category. It is, by necessity, an economic history, a cultural history, a history of social policy—as well as a micro-history of the human immune system in its changing ecological circumstances. It is a history of yams and fava beans, of irrigation and war, of quinine and Paris green, of slavery and population movements, of public-health debates that have for more than a century turned on the most effective means for reshaping the relationship among human beings, mosquitoes, and the plasmodia that inhabit both.

It is no accident that historians have begun to pay attention to such questions. Anyone who has taught college students during the past decade is well aware of how widely felt such concerns are among undergraduates. There is a still-growing interest in global health, global warming, postcolonial realities, and related economic and environmental issues. Humanity’s Burden also reflects what is now two generations of increasing scholarly attention paid to what might be called historical epidemiology. One thinks of, the path-breaking syntheses of Crosby, McNeill, and their many successors.¹ The strength of Webb’s history of malaria—especially for general readers and most historians—is, in fact, its synthesis of the published literature from a variety of disciplines and sub-disciplines, ranging from parasitology and entomology to African studies and environmental history.

The book is also, by its very nature, a contribution to the canonical history of medicine with its emphasis on ideas and innovations. The history of disease as history of a growing insight into the mechanisms of sickness and health has always been a key aspect of medical history—and thus of public health and public policy. Malaria provides a particularly illuminating instance. Elucidation of the role of parasite and vector did not, and does not, automatically translate into public-health practice. Responses to malaria, like the incidence of the disease itself, are a function of time, place, and resource.

At times, Webb is too facile in applying the conclusions of contemporary scientific knowledge, but he more than compensates for his reductionist enthusiasm by his commitment to a multi-level, labile, and interactive presentation of an ever-changing, yet implacably real, subject matter. The ultimate value of this book lies in its providing a circumstantial example of how to think in systemic terms about complex multidimensional systems evolving over time. Malaria is actor and indicator, cause and consequence, input and outcome; the histories of yellow fever and anthrax, of tuberculosis and typhus teach parallel lessons of ever-renegotiated interdependence and mutual interaction.

That individual elements in Webb’s argument may be tentative is of little moment (we assume, for example, that our knowledge of the human immune system at the molecular level is a work in progress), compared to his effort to demonstrate interconnections normally unexplored or ghettoized in disciplinary and subdisciplinary job descriptions. Webb’s vision of the historian’s task undermines the coherence of the field’s traditional internal boundaries and helps to define a new readership as well as new disciplinary possibilities.