100 YEARS AGO

The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine has just issued a most important and practical report upon the prevention of malaria in the tropics. Dr. Dutton, who conducted the expedition with conspicuous success, shows with striking clearness how a great deal of the disease is due to the want of knowledge of the nature of malaria, and that during the dry season the residents are largely to blame for the appearance of the disease... An account of the examination of one of the large compounds illustrates to what extent mosquitoes are bred by the white man in the tropics on his own premises... In one factory yard were found six barrels, and in the garden there were seventeen tubs and eight small wells, all breeding quantities of Culex, Stegomyia and Anopheles mosquitoes. Besides these dry season breeding places, discarded domestic utensils were scattered about the yard and garden which, in the wet season, would have acted as breeding places. It is pointed out that during the dry season, from November to May, natural breeding places for mosquitoes in Bathurst cease to exist and from this period the people breed mosquitoes solely in their own compounds.

From Nature 3 September 1903.

50 YEARS AGO

An international Conference of Parapsychological Studies met in Utrecht during July 30–August 5 under the auspices of the University and with the financial support of the Parapsychology Foundation, Inc., of New York. Some sixty members of fourteen nationalities, comprising physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists, philosophers, engineers and mathematicians took part in discussions of problems which arise in the investigation of those purported types of communication between individuals which are hitherto not explicable in terms of contemporary physics and biology... After preliminary sessions, four working groups were established: the first dealing with quantitative experimental studies of various classes of alleged paranormal activity; the second with the interpretation of material gathered in psychiatric practice; the third with qualitative and spontaneous (that is not experimentally controlled) phenomena; and the fourth with the psychological study of those persons who appear to display a large amount of paranormal sensitivity.

From Nature 5 September 1953.