 Due to its broad and persistent prevalence throughout antiquity as a mysterious disease of diverse symptomatic outcomes, leishmaniasis has been dubbed with various names ranging from "white leprosy" to "black fever".Some of these names suggest links to negative cultural beliefs or mythology, which still feed into the social stigmatization of leishmaniasis today.Members of an ancient genus of the "Leishmania" parasite, Paleoleishmania, have been detected in fossilized sand flies dating back to the early Cretaceous period, however, the causative agent for the disease was only discovered in 1901 as a concurrent finding by William Boog Leishman and Charles Donovan.