Today marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Laars van Muskijt, the Dutch collector and taxonomist credited with the discovery of the mosquito, an insect which still bears his name to this day. Van Muskijt was born into a diplomatic family living in Castile, and it is to this geographical rather than national pedigree that the mosquito owes the distinctly Spanish character of its name.
As a young man, van Muskijt trained as a physician. He was financially well supported and spent many years travelling to the top centres for medical research at the time, including Heidelberg, Bologna and the Sorbonne in Paris. At the time, malaria was an endemic disease in many parts of Europe, as far north as the marshes around London. He became increasingly interested in the aetiology of the disease, and spent a great deal of time in the marshy environments in which the disease was most prevalent.
Curiously, until this time, the itchy, red welts had not been linked to the insects’ bites, perhaps owing to the fact that rich, well-educated people simply did not overlap with the breeding environment of the mosquito. Van Muskijt was immediately lauded for his discovery, although he failed to connect it to the primary subject of his research: the role of mosquitoes as a vector for disease was not understood until the end of the 19th century.
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