The purpose of this paper is to review how the Chinese public health system dealt with the Kala-azar pandemic from the 1930s to the 1950s, and the historical trajectory of the study of the disease including how it was developed and localized in the Chinese modern medical knowledge system. Kala-azar is the Sanskrit word for black and fever. The disease, formally known as visceral leishmaniasis, is a disease transmitted by sandfly bites and caused by Leishmania protozoa infection and was discovered in India by British medicine in the late 19th century. In previous studies, the problem of black fever in modern China has received little attention in the historical field, except for epidemiological studies in the medical field. In recent years, in the study of the history of tropical medicine, the achievements of Western medicine in China of Kala-Azar research before the 1930s have been clarified. However, the development of the disease in the Chinese medical knowledge system has not been discussed. This paper will use both Japanese and Mandarin historical materials, which contain a large number of medical papers. We will put more attention on two completely new topics that have been neglected in the field of Chinese and Japanese history, they are, the achievements of Japanese colonial medicine on Kala-Azar research in China during the Sino-Japanese War(Including Japanese rule of Manchuria, 1931-1945). Meanwhile, we will discuss how the disease, which had ravaged China for decades before the founding of New China, was controlled by large-scale prevention and control measures under the rule of the People's Republic of China and the Communist Party of China.
Keywords: Kala-Azar, visceral leishmaniasis, colonial medicine, public health
