Dr Livingstone: missionary, explorer and medical pioneer

In Victorian Britain, parts of Africa were nicknamed the "white man's grave" because so many missionaries died of malaria and other diseases.But when Livingstone led his expeditions, they had a far lower death rate. The difference was that he worked out an effective treatment for malaria based on how much quinine you needed and the answer was quite a lot.Livingstone's notes on malaria were vital to modern medicine

"His breakthrough was the medical implementation of quinine to treat malaria," says Mike Barrett, Professor of Parasitology at Glasgow University, who has studied Livingstone's medical work. "He brought chests full of it with him on expeditions. He would have died 100 times over without it." Livingstone contracted malaria many times on his trips. But he did not realise, as we know today, that mosquitoes were spreading the disease. "Livingstone held the common view of the time that you caught malaria from breathing the putrid air of swamps," says Barrett. "The word comes from the Italian 'mala aria', meaning bad air.