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The Fever Trail: In search of the cure for malaria by Mark Honigsbaum, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, ISBN 0374154694

IN the American Civil War, malaria caused 1.3 million casualties and killed 10,000 people on the Union side alone. Several battles were effectively cancelled because both sides were too sick to fight. Today it is the third biggest killer in the world, felling up to 3 million people a year. That’s twice as many as AIDS—and it could get much worse.

In this engagingly written and thoroughly well-researched book, Mark Honigsbaum unravels the history of the search for a cure. It’s a long trail with many turns and twists, taking in the quest for quinine-bearing cinchona bark, the arguments from those who knew that the “ague” was caused by “pestiliferous miasmas” from swamps, and the scientific pursuit of the parasite that causes malaria. Without the efforts of Richard Spruce, Charles Ledger, Charles Laveran, Robert Ross and others, European colonialism would have taken a very different path—and modern travel would be much more hazardous.

Placed against a backdrop of colonial power games, The Fever Trail takes us from the fetid swamps of London’s Lambeth to the lush montane forests of Ecuador, and the heat of imperial Indian outposts. With its cast of dotty, dedicated and sometimes downright barking characters, and amusing illustrations—medical posters and period photographs especially—this is the best history of the subject I’ve yet read.

It is also a cause for humility: read what these explorers went through to find and bring back cinchona bark and you’ll never complain about waiting for that train again.

In 20 years of tropical fieldwork, Adrian Barnett has had malaria only once. It was awful.