Within the genre of nonfiction books that homes in on a particular substance or subject -- salt, maps, the color magenta -- it helps the writer to have an exceptional affinity with the material. Fiammetta Rocco certainly has the inside track on malaria. She has had it herself. Her father has had multiple recurrences. Her grandparents lived on a farm in Africa, where malaria was even more prevalent than tick fever, filariasis, beriberi, bilharzia, kwashiorkor or rinderpest.
And her great-grandfather was involved in the building of the Panama Canal, when tarantulas seemed like the worst menace around. Once the hospitals began placing the legs of beds in bowls of water to keep the tarantulas away, mosquitoes started hatching, and a new wave of malaria was born.
Thus equipped with family memories, Rocco sets out to explain everything you ever wanted to know about malaria (it resembles yellow fever, absent the black vomit) and more. She is quick to admit that this subject has often been dealt with before (most memorable malaria book title: Skeeter Beaters), but there is more than enough minutiae to go around. For those who never knew that the combination of gin and tonic originated as a way to make a malarial cure more tolerable, well, now you know.
Rocco, who is the literary editor of The Economist, makes the pursuit of quinine (an ingredient in tonic water) her book's primary focus. She cites early discoveries of the title tree, which would be named cinchona (with a bark that yields quinine) in Peru, where early Jesuit missionaries understood its importance. She also discusses how valuable this substance would have been in Rome, which at one time was "the most malarious city on earth."
In 1623, when the Sacred College of Cardinals was convened to choose a successor to Pope Gregory XV, malaria felled many of these clergymen. "Even the Borgias, who tried valiantly over the years to murder one another, could not kill each other or their enemies so regularly or so reliably as would malaria," she observes.
Rocco devotes considerable research to Jesuit records about how cinchona found its place in the pantheon of medicines. Though it is not clear how she knows about an ocean crossing of Jesuits to South America in 1605, that "gigantic waves hurled themselves onto the vessel, throwing up thick columns of spray that then collapsed upon the deck, drenching everything in a foamy swirl and threatening to drive the ship onto the jagged rocks," her information is mostly substantive.
But inevitably, in a book of this genre, the odd little details begin to seem as noteworthy as the major developments. So: in 1629 a shipment of three thousand pens was sent to the Jesuit College in Santiago, Chile. And for those unfamiliar with the Peruvian national emblem, it depicts a vicuna, a horn of plenty and a cinchona tree.
In much the same spirit, readers will learn that in 1683 the Royal Society examined subjects like the Arabic alphabet, the anatomy of the rattlesnake, the smell and color of wine, the genitals of the wild boar; in this atmosphere of research into natural history, cinchona bark naturally warranted further analysis. And when it became apparent that this substance could stop malaria, cinchona became a force in history. In 1809 Napoleon sabotaged the British army in Holland by flooding the countryside and letting malaria run rampant. "We must oppose the English with nothing but fever, which will soon devour them all," he said.
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