The mode of infection in malaria : three more Ross-Manson letters, 1898 / by Sir Ronald Ross.

  • Ronald Ross
Date:
1929]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The mode of infection in malaria : three more Ross-Manson letters, 1898 / by Sir Ronald Ross. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    it should also put the poison back into us; and this was no part of Manson’s original teaching. Strangely enough, some writers do not even trouble to mention the facts; yet, as I have said, there was nothing in previous theory to guide us towards this portion of my work, which was done with infinite labour months before anyone else had even found the malaria-parasites In mosquitoes at all. I must again explain that, as | was working alone in 1898 except for the letters from Manson, which from time to tume gave me useful advice, I was forced to invent the whole of the necessary technique for myself; also that, as I could obtain little information about mosquitoes in India at that time, my letters contained very little matter of purely entomological interest, except that they may live for weeks. The observations recorded in the previous letters were made with human malaria. They discovered two vital links in the chain —and the two unknown quantities most difficult to discover—namely, the kind of mosquito which carries the parasite, and the exact situation and appearance of the malaria-parasite in the mosquito. In the three letters now published I was working with a parasite of birds, and not with a parasite of men, as owing to many difficulties I was not able to deal with the latter. In the birds, I soon con- firmed the work previously done with the malaria of man, and in due course worked out the full life-history of the parasites in birds. Having proved that the zygote stage was identical in the stomach of birds and in human malaria, there was every reason to believe that the later stages of human malaria would also be identical, as in fact subsequently transpired. Nothing essentially and fundamentally new was, therefore, supplied by the subsequent investigations on human malaria. My thanks are due to Miss Maude Lafford for the trouble she has taken over the proofs of this book. RONALD ROSS, Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases, Putney Heath, 8.W.15. December 31st, 1929.
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