Correspondence concerning a petition presented to the honourable House of Commons / by Sir Ronald Ross on November 8, 1913.

  • Ronald Ross
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Correspondence concerning a petition presented to the honourable House of Commons / by Sir Ronald Ross on November 8, 1913. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    To THE HONOURABLE THE COMMONS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM oF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND IN PARLIAMENT ASSEMBLED. The Humble Petition of Ronald Ross, Knight Commander of the Bath, Major of the Indian Medical Service (retired), Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, sheweth as follows: Your Petitioner submits that his researches in the subjects of his medical profession and work arising therefrom have been of the greatest sanitary and economical advantage to many of the Governments and peoples of His Majesty’s dominions, but have occasioned loss to your Petitioner by preventing him from following his profession of surgeon. Your Petitioner was qualified to practise surgery in 1880, and next year entered His Mayjesty’s Indian Medical Service. In the year 1889, being then employed upon active military service in Burma, he became convinced that the current theories regarding the method of propagation of malarial fever were ill-founded and determined thereupon to: investigate that subject, and commenced his investigation shortly afterwards in India. As a first result of his studies he received the Parkes’ Memorial prize given at the Royal Military Hospital at Netley, and then became acquainted through Dr. Laveran, the discoverer of the parasite of malaria, and Dr. Manson, with the old hypothesis that the said parasite may be carried in some manner by the insects called Culicidz, commonly known aS mosquitoes or gnats, though this hpothesis had never yet received any proof. Early in 1895 your Petitioner endeavoured to find experimental evidence in favour of the hypothesis, but for more than two years continued the re- searches fruitlessly, because he was working with the wrong species of mosquitoes. These researches were done entirely during his own leisure and at his own expense, and in 1897 he refused a Civil Surgeoncy at Akola in order to remain free to continue the investigations, and was himself taken ill with malarial fever while he was studying it near Ootacamund. While there, however, he found another species of mosquitoes, and when working with this species in Secunderabad, ob- served on the 20th August, 1897, the first development of the parasite of human malaria in the insect, and this discovery, though further researches upon it were still required, dis- closed both the form and the position of the parasites in the insects, and also indicated the species of insect which are con- cerned in the conveyance of malarial fever from man to man.
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