Post created by Cecily
Can you recall any one of your favorite books from childhood? Maybe you loved to read “The Chronicles of Narnia” or “The Harry Potter Series.” I personally get really nostalgic when I think of the Little House On the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
In those books, you get a glimpse of what the pioneer life was like. You see them traversing across the west, in search of a piece of land to call home They had Indians steal from them, grasshoppers eat all of their crops, snow piled as high as their house, and an unnamed sickness that infected all of them.
In one chapter of her book “Little House On the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder says she, along with her whole family, came down with what they called “fever “n” ague.” She describes the sickness as one that gave them aches through their whole body, fever, dizziness and weakness so they couldn’t stand up. Her Ma blamed it on some watermelons they had eaten that grew next to a swamp, while her Pa blamed it on breathing the night air. But, at the end of the chapter, Laura Ingalls Wilder clarifies that, while they didn’t know what it was back then, fever ‘n’ ague was actually malaria.
You sometimes forget that while they made many medical advances in the late 1800s, there were still a lot of things they had yet to learn. Malaria was a mystery to people in the pioneering days, but to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what malaria was until I went and looked it up. So now that I have done my research, I would like to share with you the intricate workings of the sickness deemed “malaria.”
Malaria is caused by a parasite that enters the body when a female mosquito bites a person. Yuck! Any time I think of parasites I immediately think of some slimy tape-worm-like thing in my body, but these parasites are microscopic. Apparently, there are different kinds of parasites that cause malaria in humans. In malaria’s case, there are four parasites: Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malaria. These parasites travel to your liver, where the multiply. After this, the parasitic cells will leave your liver to spread to your red blood cells, rupturing them.
How do the parasites rupture the red blood cells? Glad you asked! When a parasite first enters a red blood cell, it is enclosed in its own membrane. The parasites have to have a specific code to get into the cell. The cells essentially scan the parasites, and let them on in. Parasites then destroy hemoglobin in the cell, which cause the cells to no longer flow through the body, but stick to various blood vessels. Once in a blood cell, a parasite can make 36 new parasite cells!
Time out for a second. These microscopic parasites can do all that? They actually know where to go in your body, how to force their way into cells, and cause your blood cells to go out of control and burst open? And they can make copies of themselves? It’s pretty amazing when you think about it! God created a microscopic world, with parasites that know how to invade other cells, cause them to explode, or use them to their advantage. Okay, enough of me geeking out, back to the process of parasite invasion!
Did you know it takes about a week and a half to two weeks for even the slightest symptoms to start showing up? Some forms of malaria, such as P.vivax and P.ovale, can cause a person to get sick, and then these parasites can show up again in the future. In fact, after a person has recovered, some of the parasites can stay inert in the liver for up to four years, and then re-emerge from the liver into the blood and cause the person to become sick all over again.
I didn’t realize this, but it took three separate scientists to discover what malaria was. It took between 1870 and 1897 to fully study and name the sickness and parasites.
Now, in the book “Little House On the Prairie,” Laura Ingalls Wilder says that a woman named Mrs. Scott came over to their house to care for them. She gave them this bitter powder and water to swallow. While Laura Ingalls Wilder never addresses exactly what it was they were given for their sickness, there are several sources that indicate that people in that day used quinine to treat fever ‘n’ ague. I didn’t know what quinine was, so I went and looked it up on dicitonay.com, and they described it as, “a white, bitter, slightly water-soluble alkaloid, having needlelike crystals, and obtained from cinchona bark. Its chemical formula is: C20H24N2O2. Quinine is also described as an “anti-parasite.”
After researching malaria, I am thankful to live in the 21st century, where medicine is advanced. Laura Ingalls Wilder described fever ‘n’ ague as a hard sickness to bounce back from, and one that caused her whole family to be bed ridden for days. Just think, if fever ‘n’ ague, or, malaria, was bad news, can you imagine what it would have been like for someone who had diabetes, or cancer? Those would have been death sentences in those days. Now, if you are diagnosed with diabetes, doctors can help you to get insulin and help keep you healthy and alive. Even certain cancers, while we haven’t found a cure for all stages and kinds, can be cured now. The pioneers didn’t have any such resources, and they had to rough it on their own, and hope a neighbor would notice if all of them fell sick. Looking back on medical emergencies such as fever ‘n’ ague in the pioneer days makes me so thankful for all the medical advances we have made. So, the next time you get a cold, be grateful for how good you have it, and remember how far medicine has come to help keep you alive and breathing!
Picture - https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/liberty-vittert-mosquito-bite-statistician-numbers
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