Plagued by mosquitoes

Arkansans once suffered from ‘the ague’: malaria

The growing threat from the Zika virus reminds me that Arkansas has a long and sad history of suffering from another mosquito-borne disease, malaria. Whether it was called “the ague” or “the shakes,” malaria affected generations of Arkansans before World War II, leaving some dead but many more suffering from periodic high fevers, intense chills and a chronic lack of energy.

Malaria is caused by four different species of parasites, two of which were found in Arkansas. One of those two species causes a much more severe form of malaria than the other. The parasites are believed to have originated in Africa and traveled to the Americas with colonists. It is possible that Hernando DeSoto, the Spaniard who led the first European foray into Arkansas in 1541, brought the parasites to our area.

The malaria parasite was spread by a mosquito, Anopheles quadrimaculatus — a species described by University of Arkansas entomologist Jeffrey K. Barnes as “extremely numerous, more liable to be found in homes and out-buildings than related species, and able to breed during eight months of the year.”

Settlers in Arkansas, with its many creeks and swamps, were besieged by mosquitoes. A Devall’s Bluff doctor, after traveling to Jackson County in 1869, left a harrowing description of his trip: “… the moment I pulled the [horse’s] rein, clouds of ravenous insects attacked both horse and rider. I dismounted, cut some brush and endeavored to fight them off. My task was as hopeless as Pharaoh’s battle against the locusts in Egypt. They swarmed into the [horse’s] ears and nostrils until he became frantic and unmanageable. No alternative was left but to mount and plunge into the [White River] and take the risk of drowning.”

Early Arkansans knew of the connection between stagnant water and sicknesses, but they did not understand that mosquitoes were spreading malaria (and yellow fever). Instead, for a long time people believed in the “miasma theory” — which held that swamps infected the air with, as historian Conevery Bolton Valencius has written: “dampness, odor, haziness, and clinging impurity.”

This “pestiferous effluvia” left Arkansans reeling. Malaria victims suffered from spells of high fever, followed by bone-rattling chills. These outbreaks of “the shakes” usually occurred on three-day cycles. It was reported, perhaps facetiously, in 1845 that neighbors greeted each other with “good morning, sir; is this your day for shaking, sir?” A response might be: “No, bless the Lord! I don’t shake till tomorrow or the day after.” The shakes lessened in intensity over time.

Malaria wreaked havoc with soldiers on both sides during the Civil War. Northern-born and reared Union soldiers were especially susceptible. Union Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele found that malaria slowed his march across eastern Arkansas. The late historian Margaret Smith Ross described the encampment at Clarendon in Monroe County: “… four buglers attempted to blow the sick call in the 33rd Iowa, and the first three had to put the bugle down before finishing, in order to lie down to shake. The fourth one finished the call with great effort before he too stretched out on the ground with the ‘Clarendon Shake.’”

Fortunately, it was discovered as early as the 18th century that quinine — also known as Peruvian bark — would relieve the suffering brought on by malaria. However, it did nothing to cure the disease.

Slave owners before the Civil War dispensed huge amounts of quinine to keep their workers fit for work. For example, the estate of J.M. Merriwether in what is today called Cleveland County made six purchases of quinine during the month of June 1863 — totaling 150 grains plus 13 drams of quinine.

In 1870, a supervisor helping building railroad bridges near Brinkley found his Irish immigrant laborers constantly falling victim to malaria, so he bought a “barrel of good whiskey and two dozen ounces of quinine. “I put one ounce of quinine in a jug of whiskey and sent it up to the camp with orders to ‘jigger’ the men three or four times a day. By the time I had used up the quinine there was not a sick man on the job.”

Other sufferers did not bother to add quinine to their liquor, preferring a treatment of undiluted whiskey. The Rev. Timothy Flint spent the summer of 1819 at Arkansas Post, and he wrote later that “the inhabitants, while jesting upon the subject, [used] this incessant torment as an excuse for deep drinking. A sufficient quantity of wine or spirits to produce a happy reverie, or a dozing insensibility, had a cant, but very significant name — ‘a musquitoe dose.’”

By 1900 scientists had identified the mosquito as the vector of malaria, with studies by Dr. Zaphney Orto of Walnut Ridge playing a role in the discovery. Federal Public Health workers, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, began anti-mosquito campaigns throughout the South — aided after World War II by the invention of DDT insecticide. Malaria cases in Arkansas declined from about 2,000 in 1945 to zero by 1951.