Other treatments tended toward the spiritual. One sixteenth-century remedy involved writing the the made-up mystical word “Abracolam” over and over with letters missing, until finally you just wrote the letter “A.” This scrap of paper would then be tied to your neck by a virgin while she recited three Our Father prayers and three Hail Mary prayers. But even as people ventured farther from malaria’s original birthplace in Africa, they found themselves closer to an amazing thing: a specific, pharmaceutical cure.
