I had the opportunity of making necropsies on patients dead from malignant fever and of studying the melanaemia, i.e., the formation of black pigment in the blood of patients affected by malaria.
Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran
In the tropical and subtropical regions, endemic malaria takes first place almost everywhere among the causes of morbidity and mortality, and it constitutes the principal obstacle to the acclimatization of Europeans in these regions.
In 1880 at the Military Hospital at Constantine, I discovered, on the edges of the pigmented spherical bodies in the blood of a patient suffering from malaria, filiform elements resembling flagellae which were moving very rapidly, displacing the neighbouring red cells.
