The Seminoles treated the severe fevers with a flowering weed found in low wetlands, commonly called boneset. Strangely enough, malaria replaced ague in popular usage about the same time that scientists provided the disease really had nothing to do with bad air.” Its other common name, malaria, is Italian for ‘bad air’ (mal aria). In the days of Osceola and even into the Civil War years in Tonyan’s novel, “most people blamed the disease on ‘bad air’ from swamps. Tonyan writes, “Nobody knew that for sure until the science of bacteriology was developed toward the end of the century.”Ī country doctor’s theory linking mosquitoes to the fevers was confirmed after thousands of soldiers died from fevers during the Spanish-American War of the late 1890s.
We know today that many of those soldiers died from the fevers caused by mosquito bites. Another 1,138 deaths were lumped together and attributed to “Florida fever.” During the “sickly season,” as one military doctor called the late spring and summer months, far more soldiers died of swamp diseases than battle wounds.īetween Dec. Army abandoned many of its interior forts built in the 1830s and 1840s in the remote cypress swamps and pine and palmetto prairie.
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