The crisis of the thesis of climatic pessimism: malaria and the climatic question.
The publication of Boudin's Traité de Geographie et de Statistique médicale (1857) and the creation in 1908 of the Institut de Pathologie Exotique by Laveran, correspond to two entirely different manners of considering tropical diseases and adaptability (or acclimatation) to the Tropics, directly associated with the idea of capability or incapability of Europeans to resist tropical diseases. We analyse the way perspectives have changed with respect to the influence that climate, particularly tropical, exert on the body of individuals and on populations used to live under temperate climatic conditions. The manner the concepts of medical geography, climatic pessimism and individual acclimatation get articulated with the discovery of tropical diseases, their aetiological agents and their localisation, particularly malaria, can only be understood by also analysing how the problems generated by the diversity of races and migration phenomena have been envisaged.
Caponi
S
S
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil. sandracaponi@newsite.com.br
D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D000818:Animals; D000852:Anopheles / Q000469:parasitology; D018595:Colonialism / Q000266:history; D005843:Geography / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007303:Insect Vectors / Q000469:parasitology; D008288:Malaria / Q000266:history* / Q000635:transmission; D010961:Plasmodium / Q000302:isolation & purification / Q000502:physiology; D044469:Racial Groups; D014329:Tropical Climate / Q000009:adverse effects*; D014330:Tropical Medicine / Q000266:history*