Volume 1

The prevention of malaria / by Ronald Ross ; with contributions by L.O. Howard [and others].

  • Ronald Ross
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention of malaria / by Ronald Ross ; with contributions by L.O. Howard [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    21 paludism, regarding which the facts observed by me did not accord well with the old hypothesis of a marsh miasma. I was at first led to the ideas of Broussais that the disease might be due to intoxication from intestinal organisms. In those days it was almost impossible to obtain much literature in India; and Laveran’s discovery was obscured by writers who, in attempting to find his parasites in the blood, found only natural objects which resembled them. I detected the error and, with many others, doubted his discovery in consequence, and failed to find his organism—though I obtained much valuable practice in microscopical work. In 1894 I returned to England, where P. Manson showed me the true Laveran’s bodies. He also told me his new mosquito hypothesis; and I reminded him that the same idea had been mooted by Laveran. Next year I returned again to India, determined to work out the whole subject thoroughly, the details have been previously recorded in my Nobel Lecture [1905], but the reader should know the following points. Little was then recorded regarding the structure, habits, or classification of mosquitos ; and I could obtain no literature on the subject, and was obliged to find out everything, including the technics, for myself. I was not then aware of the specula¬ tions of Beauperthuy, Finlay and King, or the discovery of Smith and Kilborne. There was nothing to guide me as to the species of mosquito concerned, as we had no right to assume that the malaria¬ bearing species is necessarily the commonest in any malarious locality, and as metaxeny was not known at that time among unicellular parasites of animals, there was nothing to indicate the form or position that Laveran’s bodies would, by supposition take in the insects. The study of these minute organisms was moreover much more difficult than that of the large worms already investigated ; and the proper method of staining was not then known. In May 1895 I fed Culex and Stegomyia, bred from the larva
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