Our Notes & References

Pioneering work on Russia’s “chief communicable illness” (Conroy p. 41), with likely the first ever photographs of the malaria parasite.

More widespread than both influenza and syphilis, malaria was endemic in large parts of the Russian Empire, particularly along the Volga, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Major outbreaks occurred every year and had severe economic consequences—unsurprisingly, Russian scientists across the Empire devoted sustained efforts to identify its cause (cf. Conroy).

By 1889, distinct fever patterns—daily, tertian, and quartan—had been identified, but it was still a matter of contentious debate whether this was due to different organisms or one organism in different phases.

Nikolai Alekseevich Sakharov (1852-1926), an army doctor stationed in the Caucasus, helped resolve this question by producing the earliest known photographic documentation of the malaria parasite—in his own words, “the first attempt in the literature to photograph the malaria plasmodia” (p. 5)—using an improvised apparatus of tubes and mirrors of his own devising. The commentary (pp. 6-8) describes each of the twelve plasmodia captured on the photographic plate.

Intended not only for specialists but also for practical use, the study aided field diagnosis. A folding table records observations from the same patients at different stages of the disease, correlating symptoms with the forms of plasmodia present in the blood. Sakharov conducted fifty observations, some reproduced here, linking fever patterns—from 37°C (98.6°F) to 40°C (104°F), with morning and evening marked “U.” and “V.” in Russian—to characteristic blood-cell appearances

“The icons are shaped roughly like the plasmodia found in the blood”; if no plasmodia were found, a circle was drawn to represent a blood cell not occupied by a plasmodium; the blue schematic symbols represent blood cells containing stained plasmodia, whilst the black dots represent pigment; the administration of quinine is marked with the “x”.

In recognition of his work, the principal and still dangerous Mediterranean malaria vector was named after Sakharov: Anopheles sacharovi.

Very rare: OCLC shows only two copies of this edition (Royal College of Surgeons, UK; National Library of Medicine, Bethesda Maryland), with apparently none located in either the National Library of Russia (NLR) or the Russian State Library (RSL).

Bibliography

Conroy, Mary Schaeffer. 1982. ‘Malaria in Late Tsarist Russia’. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56 (1): 41–55.