Memoirs : with a full account of the great malaria problem and its solution / by Ronald Ross.

  • Ronald Ross
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Memoirs : with a full account of the great malaria problem and its solution / by Ronald Ross. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    establish and the School of Tropical Medicine which under his leadership has increased health and lessened suffering in the remotest regions of the world are his true and lasting monu¬ ment.” Except for isolated efforts by Colonel W. G. King and some other officers, little actual malaria-reduction work had been done in India since I had left in 1899. In 1902 some work of this kind was started at Mian Mir, the military cantonment attached to Lahore—an absolutely flat area with an impervious subsoil, which is covered with pools during the rains. This enterprise was inadequate and was adversely criticised by me and others [77, 90]. Nothing further seems to have happened except that Dr. Leslie, who had been secretary to Surgeon- General Harvey in 1898, and who I thought always opposed everything I suggested,1 was made for some inconceivable reason Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India —perhaps the most important medical post in the country ; while all the “ vacuum-theorists ” and devotees of the great god Non Possumus clamoured against me. I was much con¬ cerned, and, happening to get an introduction to the Secretary of State for India (I will not say when), spent an hour alone with him in his office pleading my cause on behalf of the million people who are said to die of malaria in India and of the millions more, mostly children, who suffer from it. He sat before me like an ox, with divergent eyes, answering and asking nothing —and ended by doing as little. He was the personification of the British nation in the presence of a new idea ; and as I left I could almost fancy seeing the prophetic handwriting on the wall over his head, Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin. In 1908 I was invited to attend a great medical congress to be held in Bombay 22-25 February 1909—my return fares to be provided ; and, hoping that something might come of it, I made the long journey. With several other delegates, I was most hospitably entertained by the Governor of Bombay, Sir George Sydenham Clarke (now Lord Sydenham) and was delighted to find no mosquitoes in his house. But when I read my paper at the Congress on 22 February I was attacked by all the devotees mentioned in a united body. Subsequently I heard from several others at the Congress, who were indignant at this treatment, that the whole matter had been arranged beforehand and that I had been sent for in order to be publicly baited. That is the last I have ever seen of India. In October of the same year 1 I have recently been told (June 1922) by a distinguished man of science in India, who knew Leslie well, that this was the case.