Foreword to the electronic edition, 2017

The author of this book, Sir Malcolm Watson, was one of the pioneers of malaria control in the early 20^th century. His ground-breaking work began only a few short years after Ronald Ross’ epoch-making discovery that malaria is transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes. As a young physician, Watson accepted a position as District Surgeon of Klang in the British colony of the Federated Malay States. He was immediately confronted with a devastating outbreak of malaria at Port Swettenham (now known as Port Klang), a new harbour located within a coastal mangrove swamp, the construction of which had only just begun.

Though formally trained only as a physician, Watson immediately devised a comprehensive strategy based mostly on drainage and other measures of environmental management, and he took the lead in its implementation. Within a very short time, he and his fellow campaigners succeeded in beating back the disease, thus saving the fledgling town from abandonment. Subsequently, Watson worked to drive malaria from many of the plantations in the district, where it had been endemic.

In this book, Watson tells the story of these events. He details the meticulous detective work that revealed which species of Anopheles did or did not carry malaria, as well as the habits and breeding places of the carriers. He describes the various countermeasures, each tailored both to the carrier species and to the different wild or cultivated landscapes. While he clearly takes pride in his achievements, he is always careful to highlight the contributions of other scientists and practitioners. Together with successes, he also recounts his failures, so that others may learn from them; the main purpose of his book is clearly to instruct, not to impress.

While Watson’s account is historically interesting, its relevance is not limited to history alone. In its time, the significance of Watson’s work, and of this book, was clearly recognized, as is evident for example in Sir Ronald Ross’ preface below. It bears mention that, beginning around 1930, Watson applied his hard-won knowledge successfully also in Africa, in some mining towns in what is now Zambia (see his book African Highway: The Battle for Health in Central Africa; John Murray, 1953). His life’s work showed that simple measures of environmental management, if thoroughly and diligently applied, will effectively control malaria in virtually any geographic setting. This lesson has lost nothing of its relevance today, and for this reason, his book remains important almost one hundred years on.

About this edition

I obtained the page scans of the original edition from archive.org. For this version, I have reformatted the text, and made some minor editorial changes, as follows:

• The titles of chapters 14 and 15, which both read “Seafield Estate (continued)” in the original, were changed to better reflect the scope of each chapter.
• Section headings have been arranged into several hierarchical levels, and those at the first level given numbers. Occasionally, section headings were inserted, deleted, or slightly reworded.
• Some long paragraphs have been broken up into shorter ones, or very short ones merged into larger ones, where this seemed appropriate.
• Hyphenation, punctuation, and spelling were gently (but incompletely) updated. Occasionally, sentences have been slightly rephrased to correct grammar or improve readability. In these cases, insertions of mine that might change the meaning are indicated by angular brackets. Footnotes added by me are indicated by my initials (M.P.).
• All tables have been been given captions and numbers, and they are now referred to in the text using these using these numbers. A list of tables was added as well. Some tables were reformatted to improve legibility; in other cases (e.g. Table 8.19), several smaller tables with related content were combined in a single larger one. Table 29.7, which formed a separate appendix in the the original text, was moved to the relevant section of the main text.
• Some additional cross-references, mostly to figures and tables, have been inserted into the text. Several existing cross-references to other chapters have been redirected to the pertinent sections within those chapters.
• Some figures have been moved closer to the text referencing them and renumbered relative to the containing chapters. Occasionally, figures that were numbered separately but thematically closely related have been combined as panels A and B of a single figure. Several figures were slightly edited and cropped so as to highlight and enlarge their essential features.
• Photographs that appeared in landscape format in the original edition have been reduced in size and reoriented to portrait format, since the limited quality of the scanned images did not seem to warrant the use of space and impediment to ease of reading.

In sum, while the layout and the structure have been gently updated, the content is essentially unchanged. However, if you prefer, an unaltered reproduction of the original book is also available from my website.