The urge to define malaria in the third quarter of the 19th century created a lot of conflicting theories and understandings of that disease. However, the practising physicians could accommodate these conflicting explanations as different probable attributes of that mysterious disease rather than necessarily discarding one theory in favour of another. Through the acts of narrating and reporting clinical diagnostic encounters in regularly published and extensively circulated medical journals, these different connotations of malaria acquired a certain currency, not least legitimacy.
