Although John McNeill is careful not to completely ignore the role of Great Men like George Washington, he drolly suggests that the female Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes should be considered one of the “founding mothers of the United States.” As he points out, malaria killed eight times more British troops than American guns. A couple of decades later in the Caribbean, mosquitoes—in this case Aedes aegypti—once again came to the assistance of a colony that was fighting to win independence from another European Great Power.
