The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

The British also noted the cutaneous form of the disease in India and the Near East and gave it various names: Aleppo evil, Jericho button, Delhi boil, Oriental sore. But doctors did not recognize a connection between the two strains until 1901. William Boog Leishman, a doctor from Glasgow who was a general in the British Army, was posted in the town of Dum Dum, near Calcutta, where one of his soldiers fell ill with a fever and a swollen spleen. After the man died, Leishman looked at thin sections of the man’s spleen under the microscope and, using a new staining method, discovered tiny round bodies in the cells—the leishmania parasite. Leishman called it Dum Dum fever. A few weeks after Leisham published his discovery, another British doctor, named Charles Donovan, also stationed in India, independently reported the results of his own research. He, too, had spied the offending parasite, and between the two of them the disease “leishmaniasis” was identified. Leishman got the dubious honor of having the disease named after him, while Donovan was gifted with the species’ name: Leishmania donovani. Doctors figured out in 1911 that it was transmitted by the sand fly, and later they realized that a bewildering number of mammals could be reservoir hosts for the disease, including dogs, cats, rats, mice, gerbils, hamsters, jackals, opossums, foxes, monk seals, and, of course, humans. This astonishingly broad range of host animals makes it one of the most successful diseases on th...