The council in Cork, Ireland, is considering building a statue honoring the mosquito that allegedly infected Oliver Cromwell with a fatal dose of malaria.
I know this because I read Julian Girdham’s wonderful newsletter The Fortnightly. Girdham cites the story as an example of how people can have a toxic legacy that endures for centuries.
I read the story is an example of how we use symbols to make sense of our experiences, especially the toxic ones. I thought of this line, which my father used to quote:
Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols. For this reason, we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.
Since I live in a part of the world that is still debating Confederate monuments, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if we took the statues off their bases and replaced them with figures that were, say, 5 mm high.
• Sources: Julian Girdham’s site is here:
https://www.juliangirdham.com/the-fortnightly
Liz Dunphy, “World’s Smallest public statue’ proposed for Cork mosquito linked to death of Oliver Cromwell”; Irish Examiner, May 14, 2025. It’s here:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41844780.html
Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelean Systems and General Semantics; Lancaster, Pa.: International Non-Aristotelean Library Publishing Co., 1933, p. 76.
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