History of leishmaniasis
Cutaneous leishmaniasis:
Although cutaneous leishmaniasis can be traced back many hundreds of years, one of the first and most important clinical descriptions was made in 1756 by Alexander Russell following an examination of a Turkish patient. The disease, then commonly known as "Aleppo boil", was described in terms which are relevant: "After it is cicatrised, it leaves an ugly scar, which remains through life, and for many months has a livid colour. When they are not irritated, they seldom give much pain." Representations of skin lesions and facial deformities have been found on pre-Inca potteries from Ecuador and Peru dating back to the first century AD. They are evidence that cutaneous and mucocutaneous forms of leishmaniasis prevailed in the New World as early as this period. Texts from the Inca period in the 15th and 16th centuries, and then during the Spanish colonization, mention the risk run by seasonal agricultural workers who returned from the Andes with skin ulcers which, in those times were attributed to "valley sickness" or "Andean sickness". Later, disfigurements of the nose and mouth become known as "white leprosy" because of their strong resemblance to the lesions caused by leprosy.
Visceral leishmaniasis:
In 1901, Leishman identified certain organisms in smears taken from the spleen of a patient who had died from "dum-dum fever". At the time "Dum-dum", a town not far from Calcutta, was considered to be particularly unhealthy. The disease was malaria-like, characterized by general weakness, irregular and repetitive bouts of fever, severe anemia, muscular atrophy and excessive swelling of the spleen. This disease was similar to what Indian physicians called kala-azar (black fever). Initially, these organisms were considered to be trypanosomes, but in 1903 Captain Donovan described them as being new. These new microorganisms were given the name ‘Leishman-Donovan bodies’ and received the taxonomic designation of Leishmania donovani. Prior to 1903, visceral leishmaniasis has already been reported. Archibadi in 1922 described an epidemic of kala-azar in Saudi Arabia as far back as 1870. Cunningham recorded a similar disease that occurred in 1885, caused by a parasite which was later named Leishmania tropica (a cutaneous form that can also produce visceral disease). That it was an infectious disease was demonstrated by its spread from household to household, and from village to neighboring villages. But the question as to how it was transmitted and which the responsible agents were, still remained until Major John Sinton noticed that the disease had a restricted distribution in the eastern half of India. When he compared the distribution pattern of the blood-sucking insects with that of kala-azar, the map of one species of insects closely coincided with that of kala-azar -Phlebotomus argentipes, the silvery sandfly. Sinton published a series of papers in 1924 and 1925 proposing the theory that the sandfly was the vector of Leishmania donovani. Swaminath et al in 1942, proved using human volunteers that the Leishmania parasite could be transmitted by the Phlebotomus sandflies (sources: WHO www site and Himal Southasian magazine).