Desiring to respond as well as lay in my power to
the invitation with which I have been honored to discuss the hygienic
questions relating to malaria, I have chosen the French language as being
the one in which, apart from my mother tongue, I could express myself with
the greatest ease and precision.
I shall be pardoned also, I hope, for having employed the terms "malaria"
and "malarial districts" in place of the more commonly used expressions
"paludal miasm" (_miasme paludeen_) and "marshy regions" (_contrees
marecageuses_). The substitution is not a happy one from a literary point
of view, but I have made it deliberately and for the following reason: The
idea that intermittent and pernicious fevers are engendered by putrid
emanations from swamps and marshes is one of those semi-scientific
assumptions which have contributed most to lead astray the investigations
of scientists and the work of public administrations. This idea, so
widespread and so well established by the traditions of the school, is
radically false. The specific ferment which engenders those fevers by its
accumulation in the atmosphere which we breathe is not exclusively of
paludal origin, and still less is it a product of putrefaction.
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