#working on my thesis gonna bring down the mood of the whole department

[clodiuspulcher]

today im thinking about malaria in ancient rome.

about the fact that P. falciparum (the most dangerous kind of malaria) was likely endemic at least from the 2nd century BC onward that Galen said semitertian fevers (P. falciparum infections) were more common in Rome than anywhere else in the Roman Empire that the most severe manifestations of P. falciparum (quotidian fevers + cerebral malaria) were most common in babies and young children, an epidemiological observation that indicates the transmission rate of P. falciparum was extremely high in Rome that Quintus Serenus said there was no Latin word for semitertian fevers (they used a transliteration of the Greek, 'hemitritaeos') because "no one, i think, could have named it in our language and mothers would not have wanted to"