Fiammetta Rocco - The Miraculous Fever-Tree - Malaria, Medicine and the Cure that Changed the World

Another prescription, from a well-known sixteenth-century Roman healer named Tralliano, was supposed to be especially good against the most common fevers, called tertian and quartan because they resurged with worrying regularity, either every three days or every four. Tertian and quartan fevers were almost certainly malaria, and Tralliano’s cure was the same for both: ‘Take a ripe peach and remove the pip. Put the pip into an orange and tie it around the neck of the patient. He will be healed expertum et verum.’

Another was more complicated. ‘Write the following words on a piece of paper,’ it advised.

Abracolam …

Abracolai …

Abracola …

Abracol …

Abraco …

Abraco …

Abraco …

Abra …

Abr …

Ab …

A …

At the end, add the phrase, ‘ Consumatum est. ’ Then have the paper tied to the neck of the patient by a young virgin using a long piece of string and reciting at the same time three ‘Our Fathers’ and three ‘Hail Marys’ in honour of the Holy Trinity.

Gigli and his fellow Romans thought they knew only too well whence spread the fever that killed his granddaughter and was as permanent a feature of the city as the smell of incense or the gentle scent of summer apricots. From the swamps and stagnating ponds of the disoccupato , it was believed, rose dark mists laden with fever. In Rome, went a saying, if you did not catch the fever from the aria , you caught it from the mal’aria. Bad air.

The word malaria, or mal’aria as it was always written until recently, was unknown in English until the writer Horace Walpole introduced it. In July 1740, while on a visit to the Holy City, he wrote to his friend H.S. Conway, ‘There is a horrid thing called the mal’aria that comes to Rome every summer and kills one.’ For more than a century afterwards, though, mal’aria was not taken to mean a disease so much as a noxious gas which rose from swamps or rotting carcases and vegetation, and which caused a group of ailments variously known as intermittent fever, bilious fever, congestive fever, swamp fever or ague.

Whichever of these was really malaria, the Romans had known for centuries about the miasma. From the disoccupato it invaded the city and forced the citizens to take to the hills every year during the worst of the summer heat, leaving the city abandoned; abandoned, that is, by those who could afford to leave. The rest stayed behind, entrusting their health to the Almighty and to the concoctions of the healers whose numbers always grew larger in summer.

Malaria had probably existed in Rome since late antiquity. Chronicles of the imperial Roman army talk of soldiers suffering from constantly recurring fever, chills, sweating and weakness, and many historians believe that one of the main causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire may well have been the prevalence of malaria around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In 2001, British and American scientists found malarial DNA in the bones of an infant skeleton that had been unearthed in a fifth-century villa at Lugano, near Rome.

No one is quite certain why, but malaria seems to have receded during the early Middle Ages, only to reappear with even greater severity in the years when Giacinto Gigli lived in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century, continuing into the eighteenth century, when it was an annual occurrence in Kent and the fenlands of England, eventually reaching as far afield as Scandinavia, Poland and Russia.

Within the Vatican, many of whose buildings were erected on Rome’s lowland, by the banks of the Tiber, malaria was especially prevalent, striking with little heed for the age, rank or title of its victims. In July 1492 Bartolomeo da Bracciano, one of the senior courtiers at the palace of the Vatican, wrote to his friend Virgilio Orsini: ‘The Pope, last night, had a great fever of the quartan variety, alternating between hot and cold. The Pope is confined to his bed, and it is said that perhaps he will never rise from it.’ Indeed, he didn’t. Four days later, on 25 July 1492, Pope Innocent VIII was dead.

Eleven years later Pope Alexander VI died, again most probably of malaria, after dining in the palatial garden of his friend Cardinal Adriano Castellesi da Corneto in August 1503. Adrian VI died of malaria in the summer of 1523, and in August 1590 Sixtus V too died of malaria at the age of sixty-nine, after a brief and very active pontificate. He had caught it a year earlier while sleeping in a hastily erected cabin during a tour of work being undertaken in the marshes around Castello Caetani, not far from Rome. Even the Borgias, who tried valiantly over the years to murder one another, could not kill each other or their enemies so regularly or so reliably as would malaria.

In the summer of 1623, shortly before Gigli, to his immense pride, was made a caporione for the first time, the Pope, Gregory XV, fell gravely ill. In his diary, the twenty-eight-year-old Gigli reported: ‘His Holiness is not well. We must pray to the Lord.’ It was said that the Pope had caught the fever the previous year, and now it had returned with a vengeance. From his study overlooking the city Gigli could see the palace of the Quirinale, nicknamed Monte Cavallo, where the Pope lay on his sickbed. An earlier Pope, also called Gregory, had chosen this superb site, less than a century before, to build his summer residence in an effort to escape the malaria that always plagued Rome during the hot summer months. In the courtyard in front of the palace, another Pope had had statues of four prancing horses installed. Nearly twenty feet high, they were Roman copies of Greek symbols of Castor and Pollux, the patrons of horsemanship who were known as the ‘horse tamers’, and it was they that gave the hill its nickname.

At the centre of the palace itself, dark heavy drapes shut out the light and the world beyond. For some days the Pope had been lying unmoving in his bed, covered only by a light blanket of fine wool. His head ached, his spleen was swollen and his body tormented in turn by fever and sweating, then by shivering and chills. A small troupe of Penitentiaries, the Jesuits who heard confessions in St Peter’s basilica, prayed at his feet. Occasionally one would rise from his knees and another would step forward to take his place. With their gentle voices and indistinguishable cassocks of rough grey wool, they represented an unceasing rosary of care for the souls of the dying.

As a caporione , Gigli was often called upon to make the short journey from his home near the Via delle Botteghe Oscure to Monte Cavallo. During that long summer of 1623 he made the journey more as a way of obtaining news of the Pope’s health than because there was a great deal of work to be done. For while no one knew whether the pontiff would live or die, the papal courtiers lived in an atmosphere of suspended animation, talking only in whispers. ‘We are all weary,’ Gigli wrote at the end of the first week of Pope Gregory’s illness.

Among those who attended the Pope’s sickroom was his nephew Ludovico Ludovisi. Though not yet thirty, Ludovisi had been made a cardinal by his uncle, which had enabled him to amass a considerable fortune in cash and works of art in just two years. Was his life as a man of influence about to come to an end? Should the Pope die, Ludovisi was too young to be elected pontiff himself. His only future lay in seeking to influence the choice of his uncle’s successor. If a candidate with his backing should attain the throne of St Peter, Ludovisi’s eminence would continue. But he had made many enemies, and would have little time to build the alliances that were essential if he were to sway the complicated negotiations that would follow Gregory’s death.