At a recent meeting of the Paris Academy, M. D'Abbadie called attention
to some facts regarding marsh fever, which African travelers and others
might do well to ponder. Some elephant hunters from plateaus with
comparatively cool climate brave the hottest and most deleterious
Ethiopian regions with impunity, which they attribute to their habit of
daily fumigation of the naked body with sulphur. It was interesting to
know whether sulphurous emanations, received involuntarily, have a like
effect. From inquiries made by M. Fouqué, it appears that in Sicily,
while most of the sulphur mines are in high districts and free from
malaria, a few are at a low level, where intermittent fever prevails. In
the latter districts, while the population of the neighboring villages
is attacked by fever in the proportion of 90 per cent., the workmen in
the sulphur mines suffer much less, not more than eight or nine per
cent. being attacked. Again, on a certain marshy plain near the
roadstead in the island of Milo (Grecian Archipelago), it is hardly
possible to spend a night without being attacked by intermittent fever,
yet on the very fertile part near the mountains are the ruins of a large
and prosperous town, Zephyria, which, 300 years ago, numbered about
40,000 inhabitants. Owing to the ravages of marsh fever the place is now
nearly deserted. One naturally asks how such a town grew to its former
populous state. Sulphur mining has been an important source of wealth in
Milo from the time of the ancient Greeks. Up to the end of last century
the sulphur was chiefly extracted at Kalamo, but since that time it
has only been mined on the east coast of the island. The decadence of
Zephyria has nearly corresponded to this transference. The sulphurous
emanations no longer reach the place, their passage being blocked by
the mountain mass. Once more, on the west side of the marshy and
fever-infested plain of Catania, traversed by the Simeto, is a sulphur
mine, and beyond it, at a higher level, a village which was abandoned in
the early part of this century because of marsh fever. Yet there is
a colony of workmen living about the mine, and they seem to be
advantageously affected by the emanations. M. D'Abbadie further mentions
that the engineer who made a railway through this notorious plain
preserved the health of his workmen by requiring them to drink no water
but what was known to be wholesome and was brought from a distance.
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