Malaria and mosquitoes / Major Ronald Ross.

  • Ross, Ronald, Sir, 1857-1932.
Date:
[1900]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Malaria and mosquitoes / Major Ronald Ross. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, Friday, March 2, 1900. His Grace The Duke of Northumberland, E.G. F.S.A., President, in tlie Chair. Major Eonald Boss, D.P.H. M.K.C.S. Malaria and Mosquitoes. Our knowledge of the disease called malarial fever first emerges from chaos in the seventeenth century, when, owing to the recent discovery of quinine, the great Italian physician, Torti, was able to differentiate this malady from other fevers, and to describe its symptoms with accuracy. Next century, Morton, Lancisi, Pringle and others observed the connection of the disease with stagnant water and low-lying ground, and first emitted the theory—which in one form or another has found general acceptance up to the present date that the fever is due to a miasm which rises from the soil or water of malarious localities. The next great advance was made in the middle of the nineteenth century by Meckel, Virchow and Frerichs, who ascertained that the distinguishing pathological product of the disease is a black substance, which is distributed in collections of minute coal-black or brown granules in the blood and organs of patients, and which is called the malarial pigment or melanin. This line of research culminated in the great discovery of Laveran in 1880 —to the effect that the melanin is produced within the bodies of vast numbers of minute parasites which live in the red blood-corpuscles of the patient. Eay Lankester had already opened the science of the parasitology of the blood-corpuscle by his discovery of Drepanidium ranarum in frogs; and it was at once apparent that the parasites found by these two observers are somewhat nearly allied—that is, that Laveran's parasite is a Protozoal organism, and not a vegetable one like tho pathogenetic organisms recently discovered by Pasteur, Lister, Koch and many others. And our knowledge of the subject was quickly increased by the discovery of similar hsBmatozoa in certain species of reptiles, birds, monkeys and bats, and in cattle, by Danilewsky, Kruse, Labbe, Koch, Dionisi, Smith and Kilbome. In 1885 a further advance was made by Golgi, who ascertained that the human parasites propagate within the body of the host by means of ordinary asexual spore-formation ; that the exacerbations of fever in a patient are coincident with the disruption of the clusters of spores produced by the organisms; and that there are at least three varieties of the parasites in man in Italy