Abstract

We have no means of telling whether the ancient Greeks connected the onset of malaria with mosquito bites. Other peoples had done so, even before Manson's discoveries. But all we know of popular Greek ideas and beliefs comes down to us filtered through 'scientific' texts. In these texts (where imagination is tempered by rationality) fever is explained as a result of the body's mismanagement of the humours. The conceptual framework of Greek medical thought thus excludes a priori any relationship between fever and the mosquito