Sarah Perry

Depictions of malaria became linked with gender after it was realised that the female mosquito was more deadly than the male. Venturing out after dusk, her proboscis lubricious with saliva to aid penetration, she requires blood not for sustenance but for the production of eggs. Inevitably, the mosquito became connected with ideas of dangerous female agency. ‘The female mosquito is most emphatically a shrieking suffragette,’ a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in 1915.

Even the worst corner of the worst slum couldn’t compete with hospital wards and dissection rooms for filth. Sparrows squabbled over morsels of lung; a rat gnawed at a vertebra. Surgeons took pride in aprons so dirty they could have stood up on their own; one stored his instruments up his sleeve between surgeries to keep them warm. This was the Grand Guignol stage on which Joseph Lister took his place.