Malaria is an Italian word meaning 'mal air ' or bad air. It was thought that malaria was due to bad air until it was discovered that malaria is caused by parasites and spread by mosquitoes by scientists by the late nineteenth century. Malaria was common in many north European cities and Naples was one of the worst affected. In fact, most of the communicable diseases such as cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis and even plague were quite common in Europe.
Plague used to ravage the continent during the Middle Ages with hundreds of thousands of mortalities and it was called 'Black Death. Tuberculosis claimed the lives of many distinguished figures and Keats, the romantic English poet died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. It was the keen observation of John Snow, an English physician, that brought cholera under control in England during the middle of the nineteenth century. He noticed that…
