The complete scientific story of malaria was assembled over two decades of collaborative and competitive work: Alphonse Laveran discovered the Plasmodium parasite in human blood in 1880, and Ronald Ross demonstrated the mosquito transmission cycle in 1897, for which both received Nobel Prizes (Laveran in 1907, Ross in 1902). The full understanding of how a microscopic protozoan parasite cycles through both mosquito and human hosts represented one of the greatest triumphs of late nineteenth-century medicine and opened the possibility of interrupting transmission by controlling the mosquito.

Ronald Ross's scientific discovery was accompanied by an outpouring of literary feeling; he published a poem upon confirming the discovery ('I know this little thing — a myriad men will save') that exemplified the Victorian scientist-as-hero narrative. The scientific story of malaria — the parasite cycling between two living hosts — provided a biological metaphor that writers and poets found irresistible: the human body as a transit station for an alien life-form that uses it, abandons it, and passes on to the next host with complete indifference. This biological reality gave the literary figure of the parasite a new precision.