Malarial Greeks and Their Dispersion

The mainstream western denigration of wetlands began arguably with the ancient Greeks and their philosophy of the four elements (earth, air, fire and water), and their related miasmatic theories of disease, especially malaria (literally ‘bad air’), the ‘humour’ of melancholia and the bestiary of monsters. Wetlands are aberrant as they mix earth and water, and give birth to monsters. One of the labours of the heroic Hercules was to kill the monstrous Stymphalian waterbirds, actually spoonbills. Wetlands are considered on these views as bad for bodily and mental health, and bad in this life and the next. Homer associated wetlands with the underworld of Hades, or hell, the land of the dead. The association between wetlands and melancholia was ‘anatomized’ by Robert Burton in the seventeenth century. The association between disease and the miasma arising from stagnant waters persisted through the middle ages and early modern England in the Fens and the campaign to drain them. It also persisted into the nineteenth century with the Sanitary Movement in English cities. Even though the anopheles mosquito was identified as the vector for malaria in the 1890s, C. S. Forester’s African Queen set in 1914 reproduced the miasmatic theory of malaria.