RONALD ROSS 1857-1932

              Ronald Ross, an English physician, was born in 1857 in India at a place called Almora in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. He was the eldest son of the ten children of a British officer in the Indian Army. He spent his childhood in India but was educated in England. Years later Ross returned to India as a doctor. In 1842, he began the study of malaria, which, with other fevers, was killing thousands of India’s people. In 1900, over 2,000 of the 7,000 inhabit­ants of Ismailia (a town between Port Said and Suez) were swept away by an epidemic of malaria.

             Ross discovered the life history of malaria parasite in mosquitoes. He made two very great discoveries. First of all, he saw the malaria parasite in the stomach of Anophe­les (kind of mosquito). This showed that the malaria parasite sucked up by the mosquito from the blood of a malaria patient. Sec­ondly, he proved that the Anopheles is a carrier of the disease.

              Indiain those days was a romantic and ex­citing place full of life and colour and many different peoples. But India was not a healthy place. Ross’s father caught the awful fever called malaria. He took bitter tasting quinine every evening, but he still suffered from the disease.

            Ronald enjoyed travelling in India. But his parents were eager to send their children away from India’s unhealthy climate. His parents decided to send him to England to study.

             On October 1, 1874, Ronald’s father took the boy up to London. Ronald felt very un­happy. After this time he had no ambition to be a doctor and no real wish to study. He spent some of his money in hiring the piano and he started composing music, writing poems and painting.

            At the hospital Ronald Ross worked for a time as a “dresser” with a famous sur­geon, assisting at operations handing him instruments as they were needed.

          Later he worked with Dr Callender as a “clin­ical clerk”. His job was to question Dr Callender’s patients and make notes about their illnesses to save the doctor’s time when he came to examine them.

          It was here that he found his first patient. The patient was a woman who had somehow caught the malaria infection. Ross, remem­bering a little about malaria from his very young days in India, asked the patient ques­tion after question about her symptoms. He had asked her so many questions that she decided that there must have been some­thing really seriously wrong with her and she left the hospital because she did not want to die there.

          In 1876, when he was 19, Ross spent the long vacation in Ireland, and when he came back to the hospital he was ready to work harder.

           His father asked him to take his final exam­inations quickly, so that he would start in The Indian Medical Service while his father was still in India. But Ronald failed. Natu­rally his father told him in an angry letter that the silly young man had been wasting his time. The father wrote that he would not send his son money to bring him to senses. Ronald sighed and made up his mind that he would somehow master his medical course, and qualify for an interesting job in India. So Ronald decided to get a job for a few months — a job which would give him a liv­ing and, at the same time, enough spare time to study his medical books, to be ready to sit for the examinations.

           Ronald Ross got the job of a ship’s doctor on board a boat regularly crossing the At­lantic Ocean between London and New York. There were a mixed lot of passengers on board — several hundred emigrants, poor people from Russia, Poland and eastern Germany. Ronald was kept busy looking after them, as they suffered badly from sea­sickness.

             By this time he had studied enough to take his examinations again. In 1881, he passed them easily. He was still painting, writing verse, and setting poems to music.

            At the end of September he embarked on a troopship which was taking soldiers to In­dia. The voyage lasted about a month. In the stuffy lower decks the men were packed like sardines. The voyage was one of the most unpleasant that Ronald Ross had ever made. But at last it came to an end. Rooms had been reserved for Ross in a comforta­ble hotel in Madras, some distance from the hospital.

            During this time he learned that millions of India’s people were dying from malaria and he was slowly coming to believe that there must be something he could do to improve this terrible state of affairs.

        In the spring of 1882, he was given another task for a few weeks. It was high up in the mountains. Ross had time to ride and play polo and golf. He bought himself a pony and a small coach in which he visited his patients. The only bad thing was the mos­quitoes. There were such a lot of them, try­ing to get through the mosquito-netting that covered his bed.

         He decided to find out where they came from. This was easy. A large water-tub stood right outside his bedroom window when he looked into it he saw that it was full of mosquitoes, which were breeding in the stag­nant water. He upset the tub, and within minutes, almost all the mosquitoes had dis­appeared. Next morning he told his friend what he had observed.

          Ronald’s duties never kept him very long in the same place. There was now a small hospital under his charge; and he found once more that many of his cases were men suf­fering from malaria. He was becoming more and more interested in this kind of fever; he remembered the woman from England; he remembered all sorts of things connect­ed with malaria. In became the aim of his life to make known the cause of malaria and the means of preventing it.

            In 1878, a French army surgeon named Al­phonse Laveran* examined some tiny black particles found in the blood of a man in­fected with malaria.

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*Laveran (Charles Louis) Alphonse (1845-1922) — French physi­cian, whodiscovered that the cause of malaria is a protozoan.

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            Leveran found the vic­tim’s body. This parasite multiplied and spread through the bloodstream, causing malaria. It was the first proof that blood­sucking in sects are responsible for spreading certain diseases.

          In 1895, when Ross was in London he was introduced to Patric Manson*, then the world’s greatest authority on tropical dis­eases.

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*Manson, Patric (1844-1922) — Scottish physician who showed that insects are responsible for the spread of diseases like malaria.

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            Ross had learnt that Dr Manson be­lieved that the mosquito carried malaria parasite to man. When they met Ross ex­plained how far he had come with the ex­periment. Ross told the scientist that his idea was that a man could catch malaria by drinking water in which infected mos­quitoes had died. But it was all theory. But this problem became his life’s work. It took him years of work before he got a satisfac­tory answer to it.

           Every malaria victim had to be examined carefully. He found the malaria parasite inside the mosquito, and had to decide how it was carried from an infected to a healthy person. He had also to discover which kind of mosquito carries malaria.

          Ross also learned that a doctor in South America, who was studying malaria and another terrible killer, yellow fever, had come to the conclusion that both were caused by a poisonous fluid injected under the skin by mosquitoes. A person attacked by yellow fever suffered chills and fever at first. Jaun­dice might turn his skin yellow. If he vom­ited he usually died within a few days. The mosquito (Aedes algyph ) bites a person suf­fering from yellow fever. The insect sucks in the germs of yellow fever along with the human blood. The germs live and multiply in the mosquito. Then when the mosquito bites a healthy person, it inoculates him with yellow fever germs.

            In 1898, war broke out between the United States and Spain. Soon more American sol­diers were dying of yellow fever than were killed by Spanish bullets.

              In 1900, the UN government sent a com­mission to Cuba to study yellow fever. It was headed by Major Walter Reed (1851- 1902), professor of bacteriology in the Army Medical School. One of the members of the commission allowed himself to be bitten by a mosquito that had sucked the blood of a yellow fever patient. He knew that he was risking his life. Four days after he became very ill. But he recovered.

            Reed still needed more experiments. Two American soldiers volunteered. Infected mosquitoes, brought from laboratory, were allowed to bite all the volunteers. The men caught yellow fever. However, fortunately they recovered. Now Reed was absolutely certain that the mosquito was the deadly agent of the yellow fever.

       The mosquito, carrier of yellow fever, does not fly far and likes to live outdoors. The male mosquito does not bite at all. The fe­male bites only when the temperature is above 17°C. After the mosquito has bitten a victim of yellow fever, about two weeks must pass before she can pass the disease on to another person. Now that the doctor had proved that the mosquito was the ene­my, the new problem was how to fight an epidemic.

           Ross went on patiently with his experiments. He caught his mosquitoes, let them feed on the blood of malaria patient, then killed them and examined their stomachs under the microscope. The only result was that Ross came down with malaria himself. The quinine, which he took daily for several months, saved him from other attacks, but for some time he remained weak.

           One day one of the Indians brought in a small mosquito, which had been sitting on the wall of one of the hospital wards. Unlike other kinds of mosquitoes, its tail raised in the air, and it had three black bars on its wings. It was a “Dapple-winged” mos­quito. A malaria patient allowed these mos­quitoes to bite him, then Ross examined them under the microscope.

        This time he saw something he had never seen before. He discovered in the walls of their stomachs some tiny black points — the black particles that revealed the malar­ia parasite. It was now certain that the mosquito carried malaria from an infected person to a healthy one. Ross discovered that when a mosquito bites a person, it does not only suck his blood, but also injects the fluid containing the malaria parasite. Thus the disease is carried from person to per­son, not by infected water or by air, as Manson had thought.

            To wipe out malaria, you must destroy the mosquitoes. One way of destroying mosqui­toes was to drain their breeding — places and where this could not be done there must be some other method of killing them.

             The value of Ross’s great work was not un­derstood in India. Soon after his great dis­covery, Ross gave up his post in the Indian Medical Service and returned to England.

               Liverpool had just founded a School of Tropical Medicine and Ross became its first lecturer on Tropical Medicine. Honours began to pour upon him. He became known as “Malaria Ross”, the man who showed how malaria was carried and how it could be prevented. He was given the Nobel Prize in 1902. He became the director-in-chief of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Trop­ical Diseases. A number of universities gave him doctorate in medicine or natural sci­ence. He still wrote poetry, some of which was published.

                On the 15^th of September 1932, Ronald Ross died, but his great work lives on, because he showed men how to conquer a killing disease.