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.

    561/594 (page 519)
    from 15 February 1917. On 26 November 1917 I visited Salonika again on behalf of the War Office, and returned on 18 January 1918. I was promoted full Colonel on 5 February 1918, and remained at the War Office till I was demobilised on 17 September 1919, when I was appointed Honorary Consultant in Malaria to the Ministry of Pensions. Here are two caricatures of me : one from a Mauritian newspaper in 1908 ; and the other done by my friend, Colonel Richard J. Reece, of the Ministry of Health, on a large official envelope for a dinner which I gave to my War Office friends. My health was never the same after I went to Alexandria in 1915, and remained poor, sometimes seriously so, up to 1920, when I remembered, rather late, the injunction : “ Physician heal thyself,” and, with the help of Dr. Parkes Weber, Dr. A. Macbeth Elliott, and Dr. A. S. Wood war k, at once recovered some years of age ! But my time at the War Office was nothing but pleasant to me, especially with such chiefs or colleagues as Sir Alfred Keogh, Sir John Goodwin, Sir William Horrocks, Sir William Leishman, Sir Edward Worthington, Colonels A. L. A. Webb, J. R. McMunn, W. C. Smales, S. Fleming, and Majors Challis and Angus Macdonald. It was the first time that I had been employed on executive work connected with my own subject; but it came too late. I had long urged many more (real) researches on malaria, especially regarding treat¬ ment, but almost in vain ; now the taxpayer is justly punished by having to pour out colossal sums on this account. Really we still remain barbarians in all such matters—very far indeed from the Heliconian ideal ! Since the war we have been engaged in treating thousands of pensioners for malaria; and Sir A. L. A. Webb established, on my advice, a number of special clinics for the purpose, ably managed by Drs. G. Basil Price, R. E. Drake-Brockman, W. Broughton-Alcock, E. Marshall, T. H. Jamieson, and others. I think that we have had some success [98]. I saw nothing of the fighting (except on the London front !), but the following experience may interest the reader for a concluding episode of this long tale. Before proceeding to Salonika in 1917, I was ordered to stop en route at Taranto, the southern Italian port, where a number of our men were becoming infected with malaria. I left England on 26 Novem¬ ber with Colonel J. C. Robertson, who was in sanitary charge of Taranto, and my staff-officer, Captain F. W. O’Connor, Temp. R.A.M.C., and we decided upon an anti-mosquito campaign, which proved very successful next year. On