The Mosquito by Timothy Winegard

Source of book: borrowed from the library

 

Quick question: what is the most dangerous animal on planet earth?

 

While many thinking sorts say “humans,” they are wrong. And wrong by a lot. Even in the 21st Century, when we have made tremendous strides in science and medicine. 

 

In 2021, there were 619,000 deaths from malaria. 30,000 more from yellow fever. 40,000 more from dengue fever. Meanwhile, “organized violence” - aka war, terrorism, gang warfare, etc., comes in at a mere 119,000. 

 

Believe it or not, 2021 was actually a GOOD year. Since 2000, the average mosquito-caused deaths have averaged around 2 million per year. 

 

Before insecticides and anti-malarial drugs, the disease numbers were far higher. According to one estimate cited in the book, it is plausible that, over the history of humanity (roughly 100,000 years), fully half of all deaths have been caused by mosquito-borne disease. 

 

Because malaria in particular kills children, this isn’t as implausible as it seems. There is a reason we think of heart disease and cancer as “modern diseases.” It isn’t because they didn’t exist thousands of years ago. Rather, you were likely to die of a transmissible infection long before you got old enough to develop degenerative conditions. Another statistic in the book is the life expectancy of people in certain mosquito-ridden locales (the marshes near Rome, for example, or the Fens in eastern England) well into modern times - on average, early 20s was the expectancy. 

 

In order to understand this book, it helps to understand who the author is. Winegard currently teaches history and politics at Colorado Mesa University. And also coaches the hockey team - which makes since because he is Canadian. 

 

But there is more! He served nearly a decade with the Canadian and British armed forces. He is also of First Nations descent (although he doesn’t play that up on his website.) Before writing this book, he wrote several books about military history, particularly as they related to First Nations. So, really nerdy stuff. 

 

But then, after four books on military history, he ended up getting inspired to look at a very different yet related idea: how did the mosquito shape history, particularly military history?

 

That led to an even broader question: how did the mosquito change the course of humanity? And the answers are pretty crazy.

 

So this book is pretty long and detailed - nearly 450 pages, and a fairly comprehensive look at the major events where mosquitoes played a huge role from the development of genetic defenses against malaria early in human history through the challenges of drug resistance in modern diseases. So, whew! Buckle up and expect a lot of information in this book. 

 

That isn’t to say it is boring. Far from it. Winegard is a good writer, an engaging story teller, with a historically informed approach that is a refreshing change from the narratives about mosquito-borne disease of the past that are more than a little colonialist. 

 

So why is it that the role of the mosquito in human history isn’t front and center in our study of history? Winegard offers an explanation:

 

Historians, journalists, and modern memories, however, find pestilence and disease rather dull, when compared to war, conquest, and national supermen, most often legendary military leaders. The literary record has been tainted by attributing the fates of empires and nations, the outcomes of pivotal wars, and the bending of historical events to individual rulers, to specific generals, or to the larger concerns of human agencies such as politics, religion, and economics. 

 

As this book argues, however, these events have more accurately turned on the effects of disease - in every conflict before the last century (and even some then) far more deaths occurred due to disease than human-inflicted injury. 

 

And very much to the point: while dysentery played a role, the overwhelming killers have been malaria, yellow fever, and to a lesser degree other lethal or debilitating mosquito-borne illnesses. One of the most eye-opening features of the book is how Winegard “translates” the ancient descriptions of illnesses so that you (and the scientists and historians who made the connections) can understand just how prevalent malaria and others were in ancient times, and how they affected armies and civilizations. 

 

To try to summarize would be impossible. The details of plagues and wars and settlements can be overwhelming. But there are some highlights. 

 

We owe a great debt to Hippocrates for many things, but perhaps the greatest is this:

 

Hippocrates removed medicine from under a religious umbrella, arguing that illness was not punishment inflicted by the gods, but rather was the product of environmental factors and internal disparities within the human body itself.

 

It is hard to overestimate just what a sea change in medicine this was. Going from “I’m sick because I angered a god” to “something is wrong with my body” changed more than just the approach to treatment - it changed the focus of where to look for everything from cause to cure. 

 

Because of this radical change in approach, Hippocrates documented in detail the symptoms of various illnesses, distinguishing between types of fevers and the symptoms that went with them. Because of him, we were able to determine long before we knew what malaria actually was that there were multiple forms of the disease, with different cycle periods. Now, we know that they are different species of microorganism, and that these are spread in turn by different species of mosquitoes. 

 

This is not to say that this book is hostile to religion. Not at all. It is a measured approach to history, for good and ill. So, another passage attributes the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire in part to the good part of early Christianity. Quoting Irwin Sherman, professor at the University of California:

 

“Christianity, unlike paganism, preached care of the sick as a recognized religious duty. Those who were nursed back to health felt gratitude and commitment to the faith, and this served to strengthen Christian churches at a time when other institutions were failing.” 

 

Wow, how much of a slap in the face is that? My recent writings about “evangelism” are along that line. It is a pernicious myth that Christianity spread because of lots of “evangelism.” It spread because it offered something that other Roman institutions did not - including care of the sick. These days in America, “christians” are largely known for their fury that poor people have access to government-subsidized healthcare. 

 

Needless to say, this admirable vision of Christianity didn’t last forever. By a bit later in the book, the author is looking at the Crusades, and the role that mosquitoes and malaria played in their failure. And also this observation: that the rise of the papacy (protected by the ring of mosquito-infested marshes around the Vatican) led “transform Christianity from a small and scattered cult of healing to a corrupt spiritual, economic, and military enterprise of power.” 

 

Genghis Khan gets a chapter - don’t forget the guy was so big a part of the history of central Asia that a full one in ten people in the area are his biological descendants - that’s something like 45 million people alive today - more than the residents of Canada.

 

I noted a few things in this chapter. One interesting thing that led to Genghis Khan’s success in uniting warring factions (and co-opting former enemies) was that instead of killing or enslaving those he conquered, he brought them into his army and government. This is a pattern that you see in so many successful conquerors - maintaining an empire by force and brutality is hugely costly, and tends to crumble under its own weight. To really maintain an empire, you need people to buy into the vision. Once that buy-in ceases, empires fall fairly quickly. (Something the American Right has failed to understand.) 

 

I mentioned earlier Winegard’s modern progressive instincts in his writing. This is more than a point of view, it is a historical and evidence-based approach. This becomes apparent in his chapters that touch on the Native American Genocide and its aftermath. One the one hand, he never sugar-coats the truth of European brutality or the role of violence in conquest and near-extermination. On the other, he doesn’t ignore the bald facts: in the conquest of the Americas, by far the biggest factor was new diseases that indigenous Americans had no resistance to. Malaria and Yellow Fever were originally African, but had moved up into Europe and Asia along with human migration. They had never been seen in the Western Hemisphere. 

 

So Winegard correctly condemns Columbus as a monster, and calls out bad acts whenever appropriate. But he doesn’t make everything into an intended consequence when it wasn’t. 

 

One example of this is that while he tells of the smallpox-infested blankets that certain British commanders gave to the Native Americans, he also notes that this attempt at biological warfare, despite popular belief, didn’t actually work. The first (and arguably only) instance of successful biological warfare was by the Nazis - when they re-flooded the Pontine Marshes around Rome in order to spread mosquitoes and malaria to the Allied troops. That chapter is fascinating too. 

 

What did happen was once the diseases were introduced, the mosquitoes did the work of largely exterminating vulnerable people. At its peak, the Inca empire had 10 million people. The Aztecs had 6 million. (HUGE for the time in history - that was bigger than European nations by a good bit.) But by the time the conquistadors showed up, malaria and other diseases had so destroyed the populations that Pizarro could conquer Peru with all of 168 men. Let that sink in. 

 

Equally horrifying is that the Taino - the people that Columbus first encountered - went from 5 to 8 million down to 26,000 in only 22 years. 

 

In one passage, Winegard also makes a personal observation. When he moved to Oxford for his doctorate, he was sick for a month. I too had this happen when I moved from Los Angeles (where I grew up through age 16) to a small town in the mountains. Unfamiliar germs, but also unfamiliar allergens. It was NOT fun. Fortunately, nothing either of us caught was truly life-threatening - just deeply unpleasant. 

 

I learned a lot from this book, but one of the things that really struck me was something I probably should have known but didn’t. 

 

Cinchona bark - the source of quinine and eventually other antimalarial drugs - is from South America. Malaria itself did not exist in the New World until the Europeans came. And neither did the species of mosquitos that carried it. 

 

So….an Old World disease found a treatment in a New World plant. That’s pretty wild if you think about it. 

 

Here is another thing that isn’t taught much in our schools. 

 

Hey, 1492, Columbus and that ocean blue, right? How long after that did the first enslaved Africans get brought over? That would be only 10 years later - on Columbus’ last voyage in 1502. 

 

When you see the hostility toward the 1619 Project - the year enslaved Africans were brought to what became the United States, don’t forget that slavery is inseparable from the very first contacts Europeans had with the New World. To claim that slavery is only a side issue is to ignore the glaringly obvious truth of the matter.

 

I also came across another real gem in this book - one good enough I did a Facebook post about it. 

 

In 1658, religious fanatic, theocrat, and genocidal autocrat Oliver Cromwell was suffering an attack of malaria. By this time, quinine was known to be an effective treatment, but Cromwell refused it. Why? It had been discovered by a Jesuit, and Cromwell wasn't going to take a "popish remedy." He died soon thereafter.

 

Just a reminder that religious and political stupidity when it comes to medicine and public health is nothing new. And also that bigotry eventually leads to suicide in its various forms.

 

Here in the 21st Century, malaria has largely been banished from North America - quite an accomplishment and one that has saved many thousands of lives. (Perhaps millions.) But that is a recent development. Readers of Laura Ingles Wilder will remember malaria in the great plains. But before that, it played an even greater role. I won’t try to summarize, but it played a huge role in both the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. Far more than we are taught in school. Seriously, get the book just for those two chapters if nothing else. 

 

But I’ll give one bit here: the American Revolution didn’t take place in a vacuum. It was part of a greater constellation of colonialist wars fought by the European powers. Lafayette was part of a larger French response to what it saw as an opportunity to get a leg up on England and Spain in the New World. Thus, Britain was fighting on multiple fronts, including the Caribbean, against multiple enemies. So, in light of that, did you know this?

 

Nicaragua’s mosquitoes killed more British soldiers than the Continental Army did at the battles of Bunker Hill, Long Island, White Plains, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, King’s Mountain, Cowpens, and Guilford Courthouse combined. 

 

Even Yorktown was largely caused by the devastating bout of malaria that swept through the British army there. 

 

This brings up another common thread running through the book. Every time you see an army getting beat (and sometimes even when they win) you see tremendous numbers of soldiers incapacitated by disease - usually malaria. As in “send reinforcements - 70% of my troops are too sick to fight.” 

 

As we get into modern times, the book becomes a weird balance of inspiring and ominous. Humans have made incredible progress against mosquitos and the diseases they spread. But Nature is really good at countermeasures, and it is shocking how fast malaria becomes resistant to the drugs we have for it, and how fast mosquitoes become immune to insecticides like DDT. (It was phased out as much because it stopped killing mosquitoes as the printing of Silent Spring.) 

 

Our most long-lasting successes have been with vaccines for Yellow Fever, but these are often underfunded compared to other diseases. (Kind of weird that AIDS gets so much more than malaria - such a disparity that just the Gates Foundation alone carries so much of the burden. Nothing against AIDS research, but we need to stop considering malaria as an “Africa problem.” It’s coming for us too.) 

 

The history of the discovery of the causes of malaria and yellow fever was pretty fun. I liked the quote of Max Theiler, who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the yellow fever virus. When asked what he was going to do with his prize money, he said, “Buy a case of scotch and watch the Dodgers.” 

 

One of the weirdest things in this book was the short-lived research into treating tertiary syphilis using….malaria germs. The idea was, the malaria would raise the body temperature to 107 degrees Fahrenheit, which did indeed kill the syphilis. But then, you got malaria, so pick your poison. And yes, that won a Nobel as well. Penicillin turned out to work better, though, which is why you won’t be getting a malaria cure for an STI these days. 

 

I’ll also mention that two of the author’s extended family members get their stories told in the book. One is an ancestor of the author’s, and one is his father in law, who was actually a victim of two of Hitler’s attempts at biological warfare - the Pontine marshes, and later the experimental forms of malaria that the prisoners at Dachau were infected with as experiments in biological agents. 

 

I’m going to give this book a solid recommendation. It is strong on facts and information, balanced in its presentation of history, and compelling in the way it is written.