Table of Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER ONE: BOY IN INDIA

CHAPTER TWO: INDIA TO THE ISLE OF WIGHT

CHAPTER THREE: FROM SCHOOL TO HOSPITAL

CHAPTER FOUR: MEDICAL STUDENT TO DOCTOR

CHAPTER FIVE: SEA AND LAND

CHAPTER SIX: THE TASK BEGINS

CHAPTER SEVEN: TRAVELLING AGAIN

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE MALARIA MENACE

CHAPTER NINE: SUCCESS IN SIGHT

CHAPTER TEN: MORE DISCOVERIES

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE FINAL DISCOVERY

CHAPTER TWELVE: TRIUMPH !

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: LECTURER AND TRAVELLER

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: OLD AGE

FURTHER READING

THE

MOSQUITO MAN

The Story of

RONALD ROSS

BY

JOHN ROWLAND

Grade Level and Copyright

Grade Level is 8.4 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test with the entire text.

First editions published by Lutterworth Press, London, 1958 and Roy Publishers, New York, 1958.

Electronic edition published by Ebooks for Students, Ltd., 2023.

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To

BEN AND MARGARET of Ghana

FOREWORD

THERE is always some difficulty in telling the story of a man whose greatest work was done fairly early on in his life. The later part of his life, even though he still did important things, seems in a way to be a less exciting affair than his earlier years.

Sir Ronald Ross was one of the greatest men of science in the field of medicine that Great Britain has ever had. He made his most important contribution to medicine in the 189o’s; but he lived until 1932.

In consequence it has been unavoidable to give more space in this book to his work in India and elsewhere in the tropics than to what he did later in life, in Liverpool, in London. This is not to say that the work in England was not important; indeed, it is probably his research at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and, later, in the service of the Ross Institute, which did more than the work of any other man to give us our knowledge of the treatment of tropical diseases, and to make it possible to train doctors to take up the arduous and difficult work of the medical man in the tropics.

The story of Ronald Ross, however, is essentially the story of malaria; and it was on his work in India that our knowledge of malaria and the mosquito finally depends. If we know just what he did in those years in India, we shall have a good idea of the way in which this once deadly disease has now been brought under control.

This is, then, a story of adventure—adventure in far-off lands, as well as in the more familiar surroundings of hospitals in London and Liverpool. The colourful life of India nearly a hundred years ago may seem a long way off to the modern city-dweller in London or New York, Paris, or Berlin; but in spite of the change of surroundings, it is not true that these are different worlds.

As the reader will see, it was a case of malaria, caused by a bite of a mosquito in an Essex marsh, that finally made Ronald Ross take up the study of this disease. We are not isolated, one country from another; what goes on in one country will, in the end, influence what goes on in another.

Ronald Ross, then, deserves the respect and the admiration of the people of all countries; for what he did, and what he discovered, will in the end be found to have had its value for all men.

Tea from India and Ceylon, cocoa from Ghana, rice from Burma and Malaya—all western peoples enjoy these things in varying degree; and these things would not be so readily available if Sir Ronald Ross had not made the eastern countries safer and healthier. The story of how he achieved that is a story that can still bring real admiration to the hearts and minds of us all.

CHAPTER ONE

BOY IN INDIA

THE BOY looked around him. He was only about five years old, and he was sorry for his father, who was lying, groaning with a fever, on a dhooley—the Indian name for a kind of palanquin or sedan-chair. The veranda of the bungalow behind him was hot; a leopard cub, still young enough to be treated as a pet, was lying on it. In front stretched the plain, with clumps of large trees in the distance.

The hot season was about to begin. The families of Indian soldiers left the hot plains and went up to the hills during the months when the sun blazed down most furiously; and this journey was about to start, although Ronald’s father did not usually go with his wife and children. This time it was thought that, if he could stand the journey, it would be better for him to leave the steaming plain and spend at any rate a few weeks high up in the hills.

It had been in those very hills that Ronald had been born five years before—on Friday, May 13, 1857. Some people told him, when he got a little older, that it was an unlucky day, but Ronald Ross, although he was in many ways a sensitive child, did not allow the superstitious idea to worry him. His birthplace was Almora, in the Kumaon Hills, in the middle part of the Himalayas; his very early memories, he used to say, were of fir-trees and mountains and snow—not what most people would think of as typical of the Indian landscape. Now, when he was five, this annual change from the hot plains to the snowcapped hills had become part of his life.

Ronald’s father was an officer in the Indian Army—his regiment was the Fourteenth Sikhs. Ronald admired the tall, bearded men who stood so rigidly to attention when his father passed by. Even this military background was forgotten in the excitement of the move to the hills. With his mother, his sister, and his baby brother, Ronald was carried to a spot on the plain where a bullock-cart awaited him. The climb into the hills took some days; each night they arrived at a camp; there were two sets of tents, one of which was taken ahead by fast horses and prepared for the slower party with the bullock-carts which followed.

The roads were rough and uneven, and as the bullock-carts jolted over the ruts and the stones Ronald was often pitched from one side to the other; but he did not mind this, as he found everything that was happening exciting. One morning he woke very early, pulled aside the flap of the tent that he had been sleeping in, and looked out, rubbing his eyes with his fists.

There, ahead of him, miles away, but looking as if he could touch it if he cared to reach out his arm, was a gigantic mountain, capped with snow. The sun had not yet risen, and just above the mountain, as it seemed to him, there was a star, shining luminously in the clear Indian sky. A day or so later he saw, nearer to him, the snow of the mountain, and—this he thought especially wonderful—on the snow were some pink flakes. They were the petals of a rhododendron tree, which had been suddenly frozen by the fall of snow in the night.

This was all very different from the kind of childhood that most boys were living in that time from 1860 to 1870, but Ronald Ross did not know it. He found it all interesting enough, of course; but it never struck him that he was living a life which most boys would have found very exciting indeed.

It was quite suddenly, when he was about six years old, for instance, that he realized that he was speaking two quite different languages. When he and his sister talked to the Indian servants, begged from them some strange Indian sweets that were made in the kitchen, they spoke Hindustani; then, when they were called in to dinner with their mother, they turned to English. That was an extraordinary discovery which he always remembered in after life, even when he had completely forgotten the Hindustani, which he had picked up so easily in those early days. He was to spend a good deal of his working life in India; but then he had to re-learn Hindustani, and he found it much more difficult to do this when he was grown up than when he was a child.

There was a time, too, when he embarked on a longer journey still—from Peshawar in Northern India, to Benares. This journey (again in the rough bullock-carts) took months; each morning they were woken, given some delicious hot coffee, and then the journey began. Ronald’s father (not with fever now) rode with his regiment, which was being moved from one military station to another. Ronald remembered dimly, in later years, seeing the Taj Mahal, that magic palace which is one of India’s greatest treasures; but he remembered nothing of Benares, the sacred city, except that there he saw a railway train for the first time—at this time he was seven years old.

“How does it move by itself?” he asked his father.

His father, a kindly man, who thought that when a boy showed this sort of curiosity, it should be satisfied, told him the story of James Watt, and the way in which the young Watt had invented a steam-engine, being impelled in this direction by seeing the steam puffing out of the spout of a boiling kettle.

“I drew a diagram,” Ronald said long afterwards, “of what I supposed the machinery was. I thought the steam was emitted from the boiler in a jet, and blew the wheel around!” As he commented, it seemed that he had thought of a kind of steam turbine, long before such things were invented. His mother kept this diagram; she wondered, sometimes, what her boy would turn out to be when he grew up, and asked herself, in view of this interest in engines and their mechanism, whether he would in the end turn out to be an engineer.

India in those days was a romantic place; and from 1857 when he was born, to 1865, when he was nearly eight years old, it was Ronald Ross’s home. But India was not a healthy place; even the fact that white people went up into the cool of the Himalayas in the very hot season did not mean that they were always healthy. Ronald’s father had bouts of fever—the dread fever called malaria—from time to time; he soon recovered from them, but Ronald never forgot the times, such as that occasion when his father had groaned in his illness and lay on the dhooley, helpless and in pain. It seemed even then to the young boy that there was something about this illness that the doctors ought to be able to tackle. He did not know what they should do; but he knew that the regular doses of the horribly bitter-tasting quinine, which was supposed to ward off malaria, did not really do this, since even those who took their quinine, every evening, with absolute regularity, still suffered from the disease.

Travelling in India was something that he enjoyed. The heat, the flies, the mosquitoes, did not worry him very much; the journeys in the bullock-carts seemed to him to be part of the ordinary routine of life; he never thought that there could be boys in the world who did not know the rough, awkward journey, the sleeping in tents, the sudden sight of the snow-capped mountains at dawn.

Most boys think that the life they lead is the natural life; the jobs that their fathers do are the most important jobs in the world; and as Ronald Ross played with the leopard-cub on the veranda of his father’s bungalow, he was as happy as any boy could be.

Sometimes, in his days in the foothills of the Himalayas, he would go with large parties to picnic in some quiet spot. At Naini Tal, which was one of the favourite hill-stations, he remembered many such picnics, with the snowy mountains in the distance, and the huge masses of coloured rhododendrons in the foreground. He would gather great bunches of these and carry them down, in armfuls, for his mother to arrange them in vases in the house—and then for days on end the house would be a mass of colour.

One day, his father and mother sat after dinner, and asked him to sit still and listen. He wondered what this was all about; he knew that some of the older children had vanished—boys and girls of other officers in the regiment, boys and girls with whom he had played—and then, one day, they would be there no longer, and he would hear that they had been sent home to England. All the same, his life had gone so smoothly that he had never paused to think that one day something of the sort would happen to him.

His mother looked rather sad on that day when she spoke to him, in her soft, quiet voice.

“Ronald,” she said.

“Yes, mother.”

“ You know that a lot of the boys and girls here have gone back to England, to go to school?”

“Yes, mother.” He now guessed what was coming, even though he wished that it was not so.

“The time has come when you will have to go to England.”

“Why, mother? Why can’t I stay here with you?”

“India is not a very healthy place for a growing boy. You remember how ill you were, a year or two ago. It was a disease called dysentery, which is a very bad disease. The doctor said, then, that when you were a bit older and a bit stronger, you would have to go to England. And there is something else, too.”

Ronald sat very still. He said nothing, but he twisted his feet around the bars of the chair.

“It is time you went to school. You are nearly eight years old, and you will have to begin to learn things that will be useful to you, that will help you to earn a living when you grow up.”

“But I know a lot of things already, mother,” he objected. “I can read and write—I know a lot about Shakespeare; I’ve read a lot of the books in the library.”

“We know all that, Ronald,” said his father seriously, “but that doesn’t mean that you know all that you need to know. What are you going to be when you grow up ?”

“A soldier like you,” Ronald said stubbornly.

His father smiled—and when his father smiled his rather solemn face suddenly became friendly.

“That may be so,” he said in reply, “but, even if you are to become a soldier you will want to know a bit more than Shakespeare. You will have to take examinations in history and geography, you will want to know a good deal about tactics and all sorts of things—and to learn all these things you will have to go to school.”

“Why can’t I go to school in India?” Ronald asked. He knew, in his heart, that all these arguments were useless, that his father and mother had made up their minds about what he was to do—but he was happy in India, and England seemed far away, and it was, he thought, only too likely that he would be lonely and miserable when he got there.

“There aren’t any good schools here, where you could learn all that you have got to learn, dear,” said his mother gently. “It’s no use arguing; you have got to go back to England. We shall miss you a lot, but it will be only for a few years. Now and then father and I will be coming to England on leave; and in any case you will be seeing us again when you are a bit bigger.”

Ronald gave in; he knew that argument was futile. “When have I got to go?” he asked.

“Next month,” his mother said. “There’s a ship called the Lady Melville which is sailing from Calcutta on April 15. Your Aunt Eliza is sailing on it; you know that your uncle is taking charge of some soldiers who have done their period of duty in India and who are going home on that ship.”

“How long will it take?” Ronald asked. By now he was already getting quite used to the idea of going to England—indeed, when he thought it over, it seemed quite an exciting idea. He would be sorry, of course, to leave his father and mother, but, all the same, it would be exciting to go away from the familiar scenes of India, and see England for the first time—the England about which he had read so much in the books, but about which he really knew very little.

“The voyage will take about four months,” his father said. “It will give you a chance to see a bit of the world, you know. You will spend your eighth birthday on board —and I expect you will have a chance to call at various places on the way home.”

“But this is home,” Ronald exclaimed.

“Not really,” said his father. “England is always home to an Englishman, and you are English, you know, even though you were born in India.”

So it was settled. The next few weeks were a whirl of activity. Ronald soon forgot all his misgivings about leaving India. There were all sorts of things to be prepared. Many of his clothes would be bought in England, because he really had not got much that was suitable for wearing in cooler weather.

He was told that, to begin with, at any rate, he was to live in a place called the Isle of Wight—and this, combined with some almost forgotten reading about the white cliffs of Dover, gave him an impression that his home in England would be in a place of dazzling whiteness, like chalk.

As April began he thought that this was the last month for a long time to come in which he would gaze at the familiar Indian scene; he looked at the calendar, and concentrated his gaze on the “ 15” which was in the centre of the month. That was the day when he was to leave; that was the day when he would say good-bye to his mother and father; that was the day which was to be the most thrilling day that he had known.

He felt a mixture of excitement and nervousness; but the excitement was on the whole more strong in his mind than the nervousness. By now, although he was not quite eight years old, he had come to see that his life was different from that of many boys. He knew, somehow, without being told, that when he got to England and went to an English school, there would be boys there who would think that he was very lucky in that he had been born and had lived in India.

Four or five months in a sailing ship, too, was something very romantic. He had never seen a big ship; he was told that the Lady Melville was a Green Line clipper, which to him, again, suggested a ship with a long green line painted around her.

Ronald had seen the trains at Benares before, as has been said; but now he was to embark on a long trip in one of them—from Benares to Calcutta. He felt immense excitement as the train puffed lazily out of the station, and he sat back in his corner seat, and looked out at the scenery sliding by.

It was to be a long time before he saw India again— and then he would be a grown man; but, at the back of his mind, there were always, all through his schooldays, memories of India—the heat, the flies, the mosquitoes, and his father lying, groaning, in the grip of malaria.

CHAPTER TWO

INDIA TO THE ISLE OF WIGHT

THE Lady Melville was a beautiful ship; to young Ronald she appeared huge, though by the later standards of the Queen Mary she would have seemed small enough. Her sails spread in the breeze with wonderful effect; she slid effortlessly down the River Hugli, brown and muddy with the earth brought down from the hills. Ronald looked at the buildings of Calcutta; then he looked at the muddy water; then he looked ahead, where the open sea lay. It was a great adventure that he was embarked upon, and he knew it. Even though he still felt something of sorrow at parting from his father and mother, he nevertheless was happy, in that he was with people he knew— his Uncle Barwell, as Captain Barwell was to him, and his Aunt Eliza, Captain Barwell’s wife.

Captain Barwell was a stern disciplinarian, as an officer in the Indian Army needed to be at that time; he would have no nonsense from his young nephew, either. If the boy would not eat some of the food at dinner, Captain Barwell simply ordered him to get on with it—and then, somehow, it was eaten.

There was on board a young man who had been a tutor. He took Ronald’s education in hand. Ronald, as he had said, could already read and write quite well for a boy of under eight years of age; but the young tutor made him write more carefully and read more slowly, so that he did not gabble his words. He also told the boy all sorts of stories out of history and out of the Bible—about Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Moses and many others. He had a great gift, this young man, for making the famous men of history somehow come to life; and he made them real and vivid in Ronald Ross’s eyes, so that he could understand them and appreciate what they had tried to do.

There were all sorts of exciting things going on during the voyage, too. Some of the passengers used to hang out lines astern, with pieces of food tied to them, and hooks hidden in the food. They used to catch the sea-birds by this method, which Ronald thought a rather cruel process, though he could not help finding it interesting. On one special occasion a passenger managed to catch an albatross.

Then, one day, he saw something on the horizon—a spouting monster.

“What’s that?” he asked his Uncle Barwell.

“That?” his uncle said with a grin. “That’s a whale, my boy—the first you’ve seen, I’ll bet.”

The voyage was long, partly because of the fact that it was made in a sailing vessel, which was liable to be becalmed if the weather was not kind, and partly because in those days, before the cutting of the Suez Canal, all ships between India and Great Britain had to go around the Cape of Good Hope—a very long and tiresome journey.

As they crossed the Equator on their voyage south, there was the usual ceremony, which Ronald found amusing. Neptune came on board, all those who had not previously crossed the line were taken before him, their faces lathered, and the lather scraped off with a massive piece of iron. Then they were pushed into a bath of water. The passengers roared with laughter at this piece of clowning, and Ronald laughed as much as anyone.

Another day there was something much more serious.

There were a number of boys and girls on board the ship, and there was a sudden shout from one of the sailors: “Child overboard!” Ropes were thrown into the sea, and life-belts; but in the end a sailor had to dive after the small boy and drag him to one of the ropes, where willing hands pulled him on to the ship. After that, it was days before Ronald went too near to the rails, and looked at the sea. He knew too much, he thought, of the dangers of falling overboard.

He made friends, in spite of being a rather solitary boy in many ways. One old sailor became his special friend; he made a model ship for Ronald—a full-rigged sailing vessel, and taught the boy the names of all the spars, sails and lines on the ship, though Ronald said, years afterwards, that these names had not stuck in his memory; he very soon forgot them. He was much more impressed by the fact that the friendly sailor had tattoo marks on his arms and his chest—indeed, the old man told the boy that he had been tattooed almost all over his body.

It was a great experience for the boy to have this long, leisurely voyage around the world—something much more exciting, really, than the journey in a fast steamship would be nowadays. His eighth birthday was passed on board the ship, and the other passengers made a fuss of him and gave him many presents.

Something that he never forgot was a landing on the gloomy and mountainous island of St. Helena. It was here that Napoleon had died; his tomb was on the island, high up on the hill. Ronald, with many other passengers, was rowed ashore, while the ship was anchored not far out; they climbed the hill and stood around the tomb of Napoleon.

The great Frenchman’s body was not there; it had been removed to France some years before. All the same, there was something about the bare, sandy patch of ground, still surrounded by high railings, which reminded the boy of some of the stories which he had read—the stories of history, and of the battles between England and France, between Napoleon on one side, and Nelson and Wellington on the other. His father had sometimes told him tales of the way in which England had stood up to Napoleon, when the French seemed like conquering Europe; and now he was able to see for himself something which brought the whole of European history home to him as a tale of real happenings, not just a story in a book. Ronald’s father had been born in 1824; in his childhood, then, the Napoleonic Wars were fresh in the minds of most people; and these memories he had tried to pass on to his son. Ronald had never thought very much of these things until he gazed at that oblong patch of ground on St. Helena, and recalled that here the body of Napoleon had been laid to rest.

Their stay on the island, however, was all too short. Soon they were scrambling down the steep slopes to the little harbour once again; soon they were on the ship; it was sailing away, and the island of St. Helena was merely a dot on the horizon; then it disappeared into the distance and Ronald Ross turned back to his model ship and his sailor friend with the fascinating tattoo-marks on his chest.

They had been on the ship, now, for months; it seemed as if the voyage would go on for ever. There were some more exciting things to come; one day one of the sailors went out of his mind and threw himself overboard. As with the child who had fallen overboard by accident some time before, a small boat was launched and the man was rescued, though not without a good deal of difficulty; to struggle with a madman in the sea is not exactly an easy task, but he was finally pulled into the small boat, tied tightly so that he could not struggle, and brought up on 24 the deck. Ronald Ross gazed with very wide-open eyes at the man, as he was taken below and put in a cabin where he could be looked after and guarded.

Soon they were sailing up the English Channel; it was a lovely evening in late summer, and the sun shone brightly as Ronald Ross got his first sight of England. He always remembered his first glimpse of the Needles, those curiously-formed rocks; and when he reached the Isle of Wight (the ship had docked at Southampton, so he had not far to go) he thought that he had never seen anything so beautiful as this island.

He was met by his uncle, Dr. William Byam Wilmot. Dr. Wilmot was an old man, with a grey beard; he had for a good while been a doctor in Australia, where his children had been born. His first wife had died there, and he had come back to England to practise at home. Then he had married Ronald Ross’s great-aunt and settled down in the little town of Ryde in the Isle of Wight.

He was a “dear old man”, Ronald said of him, years afterwards. He knew that a boy coming from India would find life in Britain, to begin with, rather strange; and both he and Ronald’s Aunt Harriet, his wife, had made up their mind that they would make the boy feel very much at home with them. There was also living in the house another lady, Dr. Wilmot’s sister, Miss Emma Wilmot, who was soon known to Ronald as “Aunt Emma”. She, too, did her best to help the boy to feel at home.

A boy of eight, suddenly sent across half the world, and given the task of settling down in an unfamiliar town in an unfamiliar country, will feel very strange and awkward; and as soon as the excitement had begun to wear off, Ronald was homesick for India. He needed only to shut his eyes, and he was back again in India, with the burning sun shining on the plains of Bengal, or with the snow-capped Himalayas stretching away into the distance. Then, when he opened his eyes again, he could see the harbour of Ryde, the rippling sea, and the green fields behind the town. The contrast was great; and it made him, sometimes, feel a little unhappy.

Soon there were the new experiences of school. He was sent to a school of a kind which has now completely disappeared—it was known as a “dames’ school”, and it was managed by two ladies, the Misses Cotterell, who taught a small number of boys and girls the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and not very much more. Ronald had learned a fair amount of this already, and he found the work of the school easy enough. To begin with he was in a class consisting of two pupils only—himself and a girl. He used to recall, when he was older, that the great novelist, Sir Walter Scott, had once been in a class where there were only two pupils, “me and a lassie”, and Ronald was in the same position; but he made friends among the boys of other classes in the school, especially two—Alfred Dashwood and Frank Aston-Binns, whose father was the Minister of the Baptist Church in Ryde. The Aston-Binns family, especially, became good friends of Ronald’s; they had many books in their house, and, as he grew able to read more, he was given the freedom of their library, which meant that he had access to a very different assortment of books from those which his uncle was able to provide.

Gradually he found that his thoughts of India began to fade; gradually he found himself happier and more at home on the island.

In 1866, when Ronald was nine years old, his uncle moved house, leaving Lyndhurst Terrace, where he had been living, and settling in a sunny house, at 2, Lansdown Villas. Here there was a pleasant garden, where Ronald used to play, and where he did a certain amount of work for his aunt, weeding and planting. He planted a sycamore seed one day, and watched it grow into a sturdy little sapling. Years afterwards, in 1908, when he was in Ryde on holiday, he searched out the old house, and was pleased to see that sycamore now a huge tree.

His life, now, was more that of a normal English schoolboy; he was reading all sorts of books, finding special pleasure in Shakespeare and some of the other dramatists who were writing in Shakespeare’s day. His uncle was very keen on the plays of these men, and a lot of their works were to be found in the house. Ronald read them so much that he was inclined to imitate what they said in their own words. One day at dinner he said something about what had been happening, and he said it in language which he had picked up from one of the old plays that he had been reading.

His uncle looked at him in astonishment. “Why,” he said, “the boy talks Elizabethan English!”

He read other books, too—more normal books for a boy of nine or ten years old, books like Robinson Crusoe, which gave him a basis for all sorts of games.

He had, too, efforts at making and inventing things— working models of machines. “I discovered perpetual motion,” he said many years afterwards, describing those early days.

Perpetual motion—the invention of a machine which, once started, will go on for ever—is regarded by all scientists as being quite impossible, since any machine, however well constructed, will always lose some energy in friction, and so will come to a standstill. Ronald Ross’s perpetual motion machine was, he thought, good enough to run for ever. He spent a long time building it. He had a model carriage, with four wheels; he found an old clock which nobody seemed to want, and took out its workings. Then he used the cog-wheels of the clock to link together the front pair of wheels in the model carriage with the back wheels.

His argument was that if the hind wheels were started moving, the cogs would start the front wheels in motion; then the front wheels, as they were whizzing round, would make the back ones continue to move; the carriage, once started, would therefore go on for ever!

He soon found, however, that this did not happen. Even if the carriage were started with great speed along the smooth floor of a room, it came to a standstill long before it reached the other side of the room, which was something that puzzled him very much. Still, the making of the machine had been a useful experience. It may be, too, that the discovery that theory could not always be translated into practice was not altogether a bad lesson to learn. He was bitterly disappointed that hours of work seemed to have been wasted; but at the same time, this stood him in good stead when he was to embark on scientific research in his grown-up years, since the scientist often finds that he has spent a lot of time in some task which in the end leads nowhere.

Ronald Ross, however, could not see the future. His perpetual motion machine having proved unworkable, he turned to other hobbies. His Aunt Emma had an aquarium; he found great interest in the crabs, sea-anenomes and small fish in it. Then, with his friends, he would go fishing in the harbour for a fish usually called a “whiting pout”. There were woods not far from Ryde; they were fond of rambling there, sometimes armed with catapults, with which they could shoot, not very successfully, at birds. They would bathe in the sea—very safe indeed at Ryde, since there were long shallow areas where there was no danger at all of drowning. Sometimes they would take out boats at low tide, and row them around the harbour—much to the annoyance of some of the fishermen, who would often find the boys out with a boat when some visitor wished to have a pleasure trip.

So Ronald Ross’s introduction to English life was happy; and one year he learned more of the English country. His Uncle and Aunt Barwell, with whom he had travelled home from India, had bought a small country house in Leicestershire, and he went to stay with them during the summer holiday from school. There he learned a little about farms and farming; he himself said that he got to know something of the habits of cattle, birds, frogs, newts, and wasps.

All this time he was thinking less of India and less of his parents; his life was getting more and more full of activities of one sort and another. Then, in 1867, when he was ten, he had some exciting news. His mother was coming home with his sister and two young brothers. She was proposing to rent a house in the Isle of Wight, where he would be able to join her for a time. There was also a possibility that his father would be getting a long enough period of leave from his military duties in India to be able to come home. This was something really worth while looking forward to, because, though his uncle and his aunts were kindness itself, they were not, and never could be, quite the same as his own father and mother.

When Mrs. Ross came home, she found him a big boy, much grown from what he had been in India. Then he had been a rather puny little fellow; now, two years later, he had grown tall, and he had become much more sturdy. The outdoor life of the Isle of Wight was clearly doing him good. She was delighted, too, to know that he had learnt so much, even in the dames’ school. He now moved to a bigger school in Ryde, where more subjects were taught, and where there was more, she said, for him to get his teeth into, which gave him new interests. Then there was a moment of great joy to him, for he heard his father was to come home; and he was to have some months exploring the island in the company of his father and other boys.

CHAPTER THREE

FROM SCHOOL TO HOSPITAL

IN HIS EARLY schooldays Ronald Ross had had no idea of what he was going to do when he grew up—indeed, there are not many young boys who do make up their minds quite young what they are going to make of their lives.

During those days of 1867-68 he certainly had no time to think of the future; he was too busy enjoying the present. For his father had, as promised, arrived home during the summer of 1867, to enjoy a few months in the Isle of Wight. They had taken a delightful home called Beech Cottage in Dover Street, Ryde, and now Ronald had both his schoolboy friends and his parents. During the holidays they used to spend the whole of their time playing in the boats or catapulting in the woods; the great battleships of the English fleet would lie at anchor in the Solent, that waterway that separates the Isle of Wight from the mainland. The boys, their imaginations fired by the sight of the great ships, would play at naval battles. Sometimes Ronald would tell them of seeing the tomb of Napoleon at St. Helena; then they would act, all over again, the Battle of Trafalgar, with Ronald usually cast for the role of Nelson.

In the distance they could see the towers of Osborne, that legendary home which Queen Victoria had built, and which was her favourite place of residence in the holidays. The Queen had never liked her uncle’s fantastic country palace, the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, and Osborne was thus her first love. The boys used to peer into the distance, where they could see Osborne, and wonder if the Queen was there.

Holidays, for Ronald and his friends, were periods of excitement and always-changing interest. On one occasion Ronald and a friend, with a few shillings in their pockets, set off on a walking-tour around the island; the complete circuit took them three days. On another occasion he went to stay with his friend Dashwood at Totland Bay; but all the time that his father and mother were at home, he got most joy out of expeditions with them. In the summer of 1868, for instance, Mr. and Mrs. Ross, with Ronald, went to stay with relatives at Lowbridge in Westmorland. Here Ronald learned more natural history; he also learned to fish, not in the sea, as in the Isle of Wight, but in the rushing rivers of the Lake District.

The best of good times have to come to an end; and in 1869 his mother was preparing to go back to India, to join his father, who had already rejoined his regiment. Ronald was now sent to a boarding-school. This was at Springhill, near Southampton; the headmaster was a Mr. Carrick; and for the first time Ronald had the quite normal background of the schoolboy, for this school at Springhill was bigger and altogether more complete than either of the small schools he had previously attended. He played cricket and football, but was much better at the second game; “the reactions of my hand and eye,” he wrote long afterwards, “are not really quick enough for any ball games.”

He joined in the games; but he much preferred roaming the countryside in search of rare animals and insects. He managed to secure for himself a small glass-house in the school garden. This had been intended to grow cucumbers; but in it Ronald kept an assortment of pets, including lizards and frogs, and, several times, until finally forbidden by the headmaster, some snakes.

He had a new ambition now—probably as impracticable as his old perpetual-motion machine, though he did not realize it. His study of animals had given him the idea of trying to write a book which should be the last word in natural history. It was to contain a description of every known species of animal. He started to collect information from whatever books he could lay his hands on, whether at school, or in his uncle’s library in the holidays; for a long time he made notes for this book, and only gave it up finally when someone told him that there were several thousands of different species of animals on the earth—which would have meant that, if he could have compiled his work of reference, it would have been a small library in itself.

School work had to go on, too, no matter whether he was spending all his spare time on natural history or not. He said when he came to write his life story in 1923 that he was always annoyed by Latin, “because of the unfortunate habit which the Romans possessed of putting a noun and its adjective at different ends of a sentence— a very unreasonable practice.”

Mathematics was a very different matter. For some time he found geometry very difficult; and then suddenly, one day, everything seemed to fall into place. A master was explaining something from Euclid, and Ronald saw that the whole thing was a kind of logical argument— and when once he had understood that, he became very good at geometry. He liked to solve some of the problems for himself.

He was once set a very difficult problem, and found that he was unable to solve it. He worried about it a bit during the evening, but could not see the way through it. In the end he went to bed—and to sleep. In the morning when he got up, he realized that he knew the answer to the problem; it seemed that it had solved itself while he slept—or he had solved it in his sleep. After that he always remembered that it was possible, by sleeping on some difficult matter, to find it much nearer a solution by the next morning.

Algebra he was also good at, though he decided, when he was quite young, that it was very badly taught. There was far too much time, he decided, spent on small problems of multiplication and division and the solving of simple equations; perhaps Ronald Ross did not realize that there were in the class some boys not as good at mathematics as he was himself, and that they needed a good deal more practice at the simpler things than he did. Anyway, he was often engaged in trying out something a lot more advanced than the rest of the class were doing, hastily turning back to the right page in the text-book if the master should ask him a question.

It should not, however, be thought that he was just a “swot he learned various things apart from languages and mathematics, including a certain amount of music, and he was very good indeed at drawing. In 1873 he was placed first in all England in a national drawing examination. The success in this case was due to a copy of a drawing by Raphael; Ronald Ross had done the drawing in a few minutes, but it was a copy so exact that there could be nc doubt in the minds of the examiners that he was the most brilliant person to enter the examination.

When he was grown up, Ronald Ross was wont to say that his education, and the money which his parents had spent on it, was wasted. He was a dreamy boy, who did not, as a rule, take a lot of interest in what his teachers were trying to drive into his head. He would dream about India, or imagine to himself galleons on the rolling seas, mighty generals winning great victories in war, savages galloping over the prairies, or wild animals and birds in some forest of gorgeously coloured trees. His masters rarely guessed what was in his mind, because he was an intelligent boy, and if he was asked some question about the subject of the lesson, he was, as a rule, able to make an answer sensible enough to make it seem that he had been paying at any rate some attention to what was going on. Yet all too often his mind was far away from what the master was saying.

It was actually in 1870 that Mrs. Ross went back to India; and Ronald prepared to settle down to a more lonely life again. He was no longer as lonely as he had been when he had first come to England, some five years before, for he now had more friends. He could go to stay with the Aston-Binns or the Dashwoods; his uncle, too, was always ready to welcome him, and from Southampton to the Isle of Wight was a very brief journey.

Then he had a chance of something more interesting still. He had an uncle in Ireland, who lived at Navan, County Meath. Ronald was asked to spend a summer holiday there. He found his uncle, Captain Edward Elderton, a big, jolly, red-faced man with something of an Irish brogue in his speech. Moreover, he had a son, Alan, who was about the same age as Ronald, and the two boys had a high old time in Ireland. They used to fish in the River Boyne; Ronald was now getting a good deal of knowledge of various different kinds of fishing. Sometimes they would go wandering in the woods. Captain Elderton had a sizable steam launch which he used to take up and down the river, going many miles from home; but Ronald was not keen on these jaunts, as there was only one cabin to sleep in, and no one could sleep but his uncle, as Captain Elderton snored so much.

It was good to stay in Ireland for a while; it was also good to get back to the Isle of Wight, the more especially since he now met his father’s brother, Charles Edward Ross, a doctor on one of the great liners of the P. & O. line. He had brought Ronald a very special present—a live chameleon. Ronald managed to keep this in the hot-house at school, and it made him for a time the envy of his schoolmates.

He wrote to his mother about this odd little animal: “People say it cannot change colour completely. I have seen it change from bright green to black and again to blue.” By 1872 he had managed to study the habits of chameleon at some length; but then a foolish gardener watered it for a joke, when watering some plants, and it took a chill and died. Ronald was very indignant with the gardener, as he well might have been; writing of the matter fifty years later he spoke of the “fool of a gardener”.

Two younger brothers had by this time joined him at school; and they had a circle of friends around them. In 1873 their father and mother again came home, this time taking a house, not on the Isle of Wight, but at Southsea, on the mainland.

Ronald had now been in England for some eight years; and he had almost forgotten what India was like. His father used to talk about it, and draw pictures of it; for he had made up his mind that, if possible, Ronald should work in India. His father had served in India for practically the whole of his military life; other relatives had had jobs in the Indian Civil Service and had worked out there in various ways; and it seemed as if India was a country where anyone whose name was Ross could be certain of securing an interesting post, and a reasonably well paid one.

This period of what was then called “ furlough”—a kind of extended leave—came to an end in 1875, and he had to return to India. It was to be his last spell of duty there, and Mrs. Ross and the children stayed behind in England, knowing that in a year or two he would be finally leaving India and coming to England to settle down in comfortable retirement on a pension.

Meanwhile, Ronald continued to study at Springhill School. He was still especially interested in natural history; he also started writing verse. “My efforts,” he said afterwards, “were strictly confidential, and were inscribed in pencil on the backs of old letters and in decayed notebooks”. He also started painting in water-colours and for a time had the ambition of becoming an artist.

It was not long before leaving for his final duty in India that Ronald’s father tackled the boy about his aim in life.

“You’re seventeen now, Ronald,” he said. “What do you mean to do ?”

“ I’d like to be an artist, father,” Ronald replied.

His father nearly exploded. “You paint quite nicely,” he said, “but it is quite impossible for most people to make anything like a living as a painter. You’d be working for years for next to nothing; you’d find that you were hard up all your life—and I shan’t be able to afford to keep you. I shall be on pension in two or three years’ time, and by then you should be well on the way to earning a decent living for yourself. Don’t you think that you would like to do something in India? You must remember something about India, and the good life that you had out there when you were small.”

“I don’t remember very much,” admitted Ronald; “but maybe I should be happy enough if I joined the Indian Army as you did, father.”

His father looked thoughtful at this. “The Indian Army is all very well,” he said. “I’ve not done too badly in it; but all the same, I think that there is a bigger future in some more specialized kind of work. Have you ever thought of being a doctor?”

“No, father—I don’t know that I should make a very good doctor,” Ronald said, thinking of the things that had mainly interested him in recent years.

“Nonsense! You are an intelligent boy—or so your schoolmasters tell me,” his father said, sitting back in his chair, and looking at Ronald thoughtfully. “Any intelligent boy, if he works hard, can be a good doctor; and the Indian Medical Service is a place where there are possibilities of quite speedy promotion to a good position. If you will be prepared to work, I think that you will very soon get somewhere worth while.”

Ronald was not very keen on this scheme at first. He had never wanted to be a doctor, but he saw that his father had set his heart on it; and most boys who have not got very strong feelings about any particular task in life are prepared to fall in with their father’s wishes.

“What do you want me to do, father?” he asked quietly.

“I’ve been up to London,” his father said. “I’ve had a long talk about you with Dr. Norman Moore, who is warden of the College attached to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He is quite prepared to take you as a student; he says that it is not necessary for you to go to Oxford or Cambridge first, you can go straight into the hospital for training. You will have a bedroom and sitting-room in the hospital; and you will be living in London, which is an education in itself.”

Ronald felt that the whole thing was now cut and dried; he was still not keen, but he thought that if he could manage to pass his medical examinations, and get a place in the Indian Medical Service, it would give him experience of life in India. There would be shooting and riding and all the other leisure-time hobbies of the Englishman in India; he would be able to write and paint if he wanted to do these things. He was still as interested as ever in natural history, and there would be plenty of opportunities of studying the animals and plants of India —something he really looked forward to doing. He remembered the malaria that his father and others had suffered from—it might even be that, as a qualified medical man, he would be able to do something to tackle that mysterious disease and help the many white men in India who suffered from it.

There was something of resignation about the way in which Ronald looked at the prospect of his future. He would have been much more enthusiastic if his father had agreed to let him go to some College of Art and train as a painter; but all the same he was not altogether dissatisfied at the idea of becoming a doctor. The post would, no doubt, be well paid; if he mastered the principles of medicine, then there would be possibilities of all sorts of interesting jobs.

On October 1, 1874, then, Ronald’s father took the boy up to London; he was shown the building in which the medical students lived. It seemed to him to be a dull and dismal place. It looked out, he said, on a mean street appropriately called Little Britain; and when he looked around the small bedroom, sparsely furnished, and the tiny sitting-room, where he was to study in the months ahead, he felt rather unhappy at the future.

His father finally left him, to go back to the home where Ronald had spent so many happy days, and Ronald sat down in his sitting-room.

It was a dull day, with fog swirling around the streets; he got up and looked at the dismal street outside, with inadequate lamps dimly lighting it. Then he thought that this was to be the background of his life for a long time ahead; and he felt very unhappy at the prospect.

The die had been cast, however; his future was settled, and he knew that now there was nothing that he could do about it. He sighed, and made up his mind that, come what might, he would somehow master his medical course and qualify himself for one of the interesting jobs that he was assured would await him in India; but there could be few boys, at the age of seventeen, who have felt quite so desperately unhappy at what awaits them in the immediate future.

CHAPTER FOUR

MEDICAL STUDENT TO DOCTOR

SOON RONALD ROSS was in the thick of his medical studies. St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, in 1874, was a very different place from what it was to become in the years ahead. It was dark and dismal in many ways; the wards were big rooms, in which the sick people lay, looked after by nurses who had learned their skill, such as it was, in the hard school of experience. There was no really satisfactory system of teaching nurses in those days, and no national examinations. Each hospital had its own way of training nurses; and there were great variations between the various teaching hospitals for nurses and doctors alike.

During his first year at the hospital, Ronald was given the routine tasks of learning anatomy and physiology— the structure and the working of the various parts of the human body. Anatomy he always found rather boring—it was, he said, a kind of geography of the human body, and it had to be learned, parrot-fashion, so that the student knew the names of all the bones and muscles.

Physiology, on the other hand, he found very fascinating indeed. To begin with, he found dissection very unpleasant—the examination of parts of human bodies with various instruments; but this dislike gradually wore off, and, as he became more expert in handling the various instruments and more adept with the microscope, he found that he gained a sense of wonder at the way in which the body worked.

He made friends, too—Ronald Ross was always, all through his life, a friendly soul. His best friends were George Dennys and Charles Bamber, who had rooms next to his; they became known to the other students as a trio who were always together. Both Dennys and Bamber were hard workers—they worked much harder, indeed, than Ronald. He said afterwards that these two fellows were really interested in medicine, which he never was. Ronald’s interest was the interest in the way in which the body worked—not, as with the best doctors, the interest in disease and the way in which it could be dealt with and counteracted. They both entered the Indian Medical Service later on, and he occasionally saw them in India.

There were other friends, too, and there were all the excitements of student life—parties and dances, and some organized games, though Ronald took little or no part in these.

The work of the student was, however, hard; there was not very much leisure-time for all the activities that Ronald would liked to have indulged in. His painting almost ceased; even his verse-writing stopped during term-time; but at the end of his first year, when he joined his mother in a house near Portsmouth, he found that there were friends in the neighbourhood who were interested in books, painting, and music.

He was very ambitious in his writing, and started trying to write plays in verse—maybe this was something that was the result of his interest in Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan playwrights, which had been shown years before.

He had never been really “hard up” financially, as his father, in addition to paying his fees, had always made him an allowance. In 1875, when Mrs. Ross and Ronald’s sister Marion went back to India, his father was appointed Brigadier-General in charge of the Indian Army station at Peshawar, and was able to give him an increased allowance.

His first-year course having been completed, he was now well acquainted with the routine of the hospital. He also had an uncle, a retired lieutenant-colonel, called William Alexander Ross, who lived in London, in a house at Shepherd’s Bush. It was William Alexander Ross who first infected Ronald with the joy of scientific research.

His uncle was an odd-looking man—tall and thin, with a flowing beard. In the basement of his house he had a chemical laboratory, where he used to work all day long. He wore a long, flowered dressing-gown while he was working in his laboratory, and looked like one of the alchemists of the Middle Ages. He was working on a method of chemical analysis which consisted of making a bead of boric acid in a tiny loop of platinum wire. This was done by using a blowpipe and heating the boric acid to a very high temperature. Then a tiny piece of the substance to be analysed was added to the boric acid bead, and the change in colour of the bead would enable the scientist to say what was the substance that had been added.

Occasionally Ronald would go along and watch his uncle at work. One day he said: “ Uncle, why don’t you examine the beads under the microscope?”

“Why?” asked his uncle, looking very puzzled.

“You just judge by the colour. Don’t you think, if you saw the thing in more detail, it might give you more information?”

“The colour gives all the information I want,” said his uncle. “I can’t see that you would know any more, even though you did see the bead in more detail. Still, if you feel like doing it, there is a microscope here. You get on with it, and tell me if you see anything worth while there.”

Ronald focused the microscope, took one of the boric acid beads, and looked at it. It showed some rather remarkable results; the colour which enabled his uncle to identify the substance added was now seen to be a series of long streaks, buried in a clear, glass-like substance. Ronald looked at some other beads, and saw that the same thing was true. It was something, he thought, rather surprising; for the colour was not solidly based throughout the bead; always it was found in streaks; and the effect was often remarkably beautiful.

He showed his uncle these things, and the old gentleman glanced at the beautiful streaks of colour. Then he turned away impatiently from the microscope.

“All very pretty,” he said testily, “but I can’t see that it is of any use to anybody.”

His uncle wrote a book on the use of the blowpipe, which was more or less ignored by the scientists of his day. Years afterwards, however, when he was attending a meeting of scientists in the United States, Ronald was introduced to a distinguished American chemist, who told him that he had long admired his book on blowpipe chemistry. By that time, of course, his uncle had long been dead; but Ronald was surprised that he should be confused with the old gentleman who, though a pure amateur in science, had done some worthwhile work.

It seems sure enough that it was his uncle who made him see something of the fascination of scientific research, even though the work that made Ronald famous was in a quite different branch of science from that in which his uncle had spent his years of retirement.

Ronald was working in the hospital still; he studied chemistry, botany, and materia medica (that is, the drugs which are used in medicine); he did not find the work as interesting as he had hoped, and he found that he was spending a lot of spare time in studying music. He spent some of his money in hiring a piano and, though he had forgotten most of the music which he had learned in his schooldays, now set out to teach himself to play the works of the great masters—especially Mozart and Beethoven. He found it easier to learn the works by heart than to play them off the printed page, and sometimes he surprised his friends by playing some great work without having any sheet music on the piano at all. He also taught himself to play the flute; one day while at home with his mother, he had found, at the bottom of a drawer, a flute which had belonged to his grandfather.

The medical staff at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital included many of the greatest doctors of the day, though it is feared that some of them made little impression on Ronald, who went his own way as a rule.

The greatest surgeon in the hospital was Mr. Savory, famous for his skill in operations. For a time Ronald worked as what was called a “dresser” for him, assisting at operations without, of course, actually taking any active part in the actual work of the surgeon; standing by, handing him instruments when they were needed, and the like—very good experience, even though, in the years ahead, Ronald was not to do much in the way of surgical work.

Later he was appointed to the post of “clinical clerk” to a Dr. Callendar, and this he found the most interesting task that had come his way since starting as a medical student. In Dr. Callendar’s office, the “clinical clerk” had the task of setting down, ready for the doctor, the full details of the patients that came for treatment, the symptoms, and offering hints (if he could) as to what was the matter with the patient. It was here that he found his first case of malaria outside India. The patient was a tall, angular woman who had somehow caught the malarial infection at her home in Essex—something rare in those days, and practically unknown since.

Ronald, remembering a little about malaria from his very young days in India, found this case of the greatest possible interest. He asked the patient question after question about her symptoms and her feelings until she thought something was seriously wrong with her. Indeed, she became so worried that she hurried out of the hospital and, when Dr. Callendar arrived in the office, he found Ronald Ross, rather alarmed, sitting in the chair with some voluminous notes in front of him, but no patient!

It was a little later than this that Ronald took part in what was almost a riot. A student threw a snowball at another one, somehow missed the target, and, purely by accident, hit a policeman full in the face. The policeman had been standing outside the hospital gates. The policeman, in a rage, came in to arrest the young man who had thrown the snowball; other students gathered round; the policeman blew his whistle, and others came quickly.

Before more than a few minutes had passed, there were about thirty policemen in the quadrangle, but about three hundred students; one by one the constables were pushed out of the gates, and, when they were all out, the gates were slammed fast. This caused a lot of trouble, as would be expected; but Ronald had not been there at the start, and was lucky enough to escape the punishment which was awarded to many of the students by the hospital authorities.

It will be seen, then, that life was not all study. Indeed, Ronald Ross, in those student days, was not the kind of person for whom his tutors would have forecast a brilliant future. He was often accused of wasting his time; but, in actuality, all the time he was preparing himself for the work that was to be his real life-occupation.

In 1876, when he was nineteen, he spent the long vacation in Ireland—the first time he had been there for some years. His uncle, with whom he had spent a holiday during schooldays, was dead; but his cousins were still there, and they spent some happy times with canoes on the River Boyne. There was hay-making and open-air cookery; and on one occasion they camped on an island in the middle of a small lake, but they could not sleep because the owls hooted all night.

When he came back to the hospital, he felt refreshed and more ready to work; though even now he was still on occasion the mad-cap student. On one evening a group of the students took a box at a theatre, situated just above the trombone-player in the orchestra. A friend of Ronald’s, seeing a possibility in the position of their box, went to the bar and bought a glass of beer, which he smuggled into the box. Then, when the orchestra started playing, he leaned out of the box and slowly poured the glass of beer into the mouth of the trombone! The result was that the students were ejected from the theatre, which did not worry them unduly.

Medical training in those days was a little less systematic than it afterwards became, and Ronald took six months off from his hospital studies to serve as unqualified Assistant House Surgeon at Shrewsbury Infirmary. It was at Shrewsbury that he first learned of the great work of Lord Lister on antiseptics. A new doctor, who had been a student of Lister, came to the hospital, and the success of his treatments convinced Ronald that here was one of the greatest discoveries in medicine. This was the discovery that operations could only be certain of success if all instruments, dressings, and the like were kept scrupulously clean and free from germs.

When he came back to the hospital, faced with the need to take examinations, he received a letter from his father, still commanding at Peshawar. This suggested that it would be as well if Ronald took his final examinations quickly, so that he would start in the Indian Medical Service while his father was still in India.

Ronald was not lazy; but he now had so many interests of one sort and another that he found it difficult to concentrate on the needful “grind” for the examinations. One day he woke up to the fact that the examination for membership of the College of Surgeons was only three days away, and that there were many things in the syllabus about which he was supposed to know a lot, but which he had not sufficiently studied.

He hurried off to a friend called McKee, who was well known as a “swot”.

“I say, McKee,” he said, “can you give me a bit of coaching?”

“A bit late in the day, isn’t it?” McKee said.

“ I know it is,” Ronald said, “but I think that if you can push a bit more into my head, I’ve got at any rate a chance of getting through.”

They spent the best part of the three days studying together. McKee would read a passage from a medical text-book aloud to Ross. Then Ross would try to repeat it back to him, without missing out any of the important points. So successful was this course that Ronald passed his examination, on July 30, 1879; oddly enough, though, his friend McKee failed.

Ronald was therefore a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons at the age of twenty-two. He now thought, however, that he could get through any examination without hard work. To get into the Indian Medical Service it was necessary to have both surgical and medical qualifications, and to take his medical examination, he thought he could repeat the feat of the M.R.C.S. examination—only more so. This time, he told himself, the examination started at three o’clock in the afternoon; he would spend his morning with his books, and then he would be in a fit state to take the examination in the afternoon. He was to be examined by some eminent physicians, not by writing down answers to questions, but by a viva voce examination, when they would ask him various medical questions, and he would have to answer them in the course of ordinary conversation.

He had allowed himself only the morning to do his final “swotting this was not enough time to cover the whole of the syllabus, by any means. He had to miss out some of the parts; he thought that the examination would almost certainly be on some of the commoner diseases and their symptoms, so he read up these as carefully as he could in the limited time at his disposal. There was no doubt, he told himself, that he would get through. If they asked about any disease, from measles to tuberculosis, he would be able to tell them all that it was necessary to know about the symptoms and the treatment.

There was a section in the syllabus which dealt with the commoner poisons and their antidotes, but Ronald told himself that he could safely ignore that. The doctors who were to interview him would be interested in diseases, not in poisons.

The viva voce examination began; there was, of course, no time for the examiner to go through anything like the whole syllabus; he usually picked some small section of it more or less at random, and questioned the student on that. It was assumed that if a student knew about one part of the syllabus, he would be likely to know about it all. There was an element of luck in it; but then there is an element of luck in most examinations.

Ronald Ross’s luck was certainly out—as he realized as soon as the viva voce examination began. The examiner started to question him—on poisons and their antidotes!

The one part of the syllabus about which he knew nothing at all was the one part of the syllabus about which he was being questioned.

The result was a foregone conclusion, as he realized as soon as he came out of the examination room. He had failed.

Naturally his father was annoyed; it meant that Ronald would not be able to enter the Indian Medical Service that year, because there was a rule at the hospital that a student who had failed in an examination could not take it again for some months. His father told him, in an angry letter, that he had been wasting his time (as, indeed, in some degree, he had) and threatened to reduce the allowance that was being paid to him. This, his father thought, might bring the silly young man to his senses.

Ronald, however, in spite of all his foolish pranks, was not as silly as his father thought; he had, too, a conscience. He knew that he had, in a way, let his father down over this failure with the medical examination; he did not think that it was quite fair to go on taking money from his father, when he might (had he worked) have had a good opportunity, in the Indian Medical Service, of earning a good salary by now.

He decided that he would try to get a job for a few months—a job which would bring him a living, and which would, at the same time, give him enough spare time to study his medical books and make sure that when he sat the examination again, there would be no danger of a second failure.

There was one post which any man with a single qualification could take—Ronald’s M.R.C.S. was such a qualification. That was the post of ship’s doctor. So a ship’s doctor he resolved to become, and that without delay.

CHAPTER FIVE

SEA AND LAND

MOST PEOPLE would have thought that the job of a ship’s doctor was a very exciting and romantic one; Ronald Ross, on the whole, did not find it so. He was appointed surgeon to the steamship Alsatia, a medium sized vessel which was then regularly crossing the Atlantic Ocean between London and New York.

At first he meant to have only a few weeks on the ship, crossing the Atlantic two or three times each way, and spending all his spare time in “swotting”; but in the end he made five crossings each way. Even though there was not very much excitement in the life, he found it pleasant, and he also realized that he was doing a good deal more studying than he would have done had he stayed at home.

He was a good sailor; even when some of the crossings were rough, he did not find that this affected him at all. Moreover, there were a mixed lot of passengers on board, and Ronald Ross was always interested in people of various types. There were first-class passengers, who sometimes thought themselves very important; there were also some people who were emigrating, leaving England to seek their fortune in the United States; there was a good deal of cargo of one sort and another; even cattle were carried on occasion.

It all added up to an interesting life; and Ronald (who was Scots by descent, even though he had never seen Scotland) was interested to find that almost all the officers were Scots. Most of those on board seemed to have a strong accent of one sort or another; on one occasion, during Ronald’s first crossing from New York to London, he was talking to two French ladies who were passengers. They spoke with a strong American accent, since they had lived in New York for some time.

One of them said to him: “Doctor, do tell us; your accent is so much softer than everyone else’s on board this ship; say, what is it?”

Ronald laughed. “The truth,” he said, “is that I am the only one on board this ship who speaks the Queens’ English!”

One of the problems was looking after the emigrants— these were often poor people from Poland or other countries in Eastern Europe. As a rule they had only just about managed to scrape together enough money to make the journey. They were crowded together in the after-decks; and they often suffered from severe seasickness, probably because they were undernourished. Ronald used to go among them, giving them what he could in the way of medicines to help the sickness from which they were suffering.

One Russian to whom he had given some medicine said to him: “The trouble with this ship is the butter—it makes me sick.”

“The butter seems all right to me,” Ronald said.

“If I could have castor-oil instead, then I should be all right,” objected the Russian.

By far the most exciting event of his period as a ship’s doctor came during a terrifying Atlantic storm. The Alsatia was ploughing her way through some terrific waves, when they sighted a small and rather grubbylooking steamer which was drawing near to them. As they came very close, they could see a man on the rails, with a huge trumpet at his mouth.

“Ahoy, there!” he shouted. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” shouted an officer from the bridge, having also provided himself with a megaphone. “What do you want?”

“Have you got a doctor aboard?”

“Yes.”

“Can he do an operation?”

Ronald Ross was brought on deck, and told to speak to the other ship. It seemed that an engineer on the tramp steamer had seriously hurt his arm, having caught it in the machinery while he was working below. The captain thought that the arm would have to be amputated; but the tramp had no doctor on board.

Ronald did not much fancy the foaming surface of the sea; but he knew that no doctor worth his salt would ever refuse an errand of mercy of this kind. A small boat, manned by several strong sailors, was somehow launched. She tossed in the great waves like a cork, and several times she was almost overturned; but in the end, by some means which Ronald never quite understood, the men were hauled on board the tramp steamer, and he found himself staggering along the wet and greasy deck.

In the cabin conditions were very difficult. He remembered the operations he had seen performed in the operating theatres at hospital; the bright lights, the spotless operating tables. Here he had a man lying on an untidy bunk, and a hurricane lantern hanging from the roof, swinging and casting shadows with every roll of the ship. Shadows made it almost impossible to do anything even in the way of an examination; but Ronald soon saw that the man’s arm was quite useless, at least from the elbow downwards. It had been crushed by the engine in which it had been caught. The necessary equipment was there; Ronald had brought chloroform, as well as all the instruments for an amputation; so the first operation which he carried out by himself, away from all authorities, was an operation that few doctors would have cared to attempt at all. He felt that he must amputate the arm above the elbow; the officers stood by sympathetically, giving what assistance they could in the way of handing over such things as were necessary. Somehow Ronald tied up the severed arteries; somehow he brought the operation to a satisfactory conclusion; then he had to face the ordeal of the journey back to the Alsatia. This was now a worse nightmare than it had been at the beginning, for the seas were wilder than ever. The sailors pulled valiantly at the oars; more than once they were all but swamped by the mighty seas, but in the end they managed to make their way back to their own ship and scramble up the ropes. They were all soaked to the skin; but they felt that they were very fortunate indeed to be alive.

Ronald looked back on this experience, in after years, as one of the most alarming that he had ever undergone. Soon after this voyage he decided that he had managed to master all that he needed for his physician’s examination, and he passed it without much difficulty.

Now he had to try to pass the entrance examination for the Indian Medical Service; in 1880 his father and mother had left India for good and taken a house near Southampton. It was here that Ronald joined them when his voyages were over, and prepared to make his effort to pass the entrance for the Medical Service. He passed fairly easily and he was placed seventeenth in all England; he then learned that he had to take a special course, lasting three or four months, in military medicine and surgery. This took place at Netley, which was not far away from Southampton. Across the sparkling waters of the Solent, he could see the Isle of Wight, where he had spent happy days in childhood; and in his leisure hours he could get home to see his parents.

It was during the summer of 1881 that he spent this time in preparing for his life’s work. It was a lovely summer, and almost every night he could hear the nightingale singing. Also (and this was something that seemed to haunt him wherever he went) he was often bitten by mosquitoes. The students went to lectures on all sorts of subjects which were expected to be of use to them at later stages; they learned how to analyse water and food, how to ensure adequate ventilation in a hot climate, what were to be the best sanitary arrangements when the water supply was doubtful, the treatment of tropical diseases like dysentery and malaria. They were told nothing, Ronald recalled afterwards, about bacteriology—the study of the germs which were responsible for these diseases.

It was the year before this that a French Army surgeon working in Algeria, Alphonse Laveran, discovered that malaria was due to a tiny parasite in the blood of the patient; but these young men, who were being trained in tropical medicine, were told nothing about this— indeed, it was doubtful whether those who were teaching them knew anything about it.

The course was arduous and difficult, and Ronald worked very hard at it; when it had been completed, the young students were granted six weeks of well-earned leave before they were expected to embark for India.

Ronald spent this leave, naturally enough, with his parents. One of his brothers had just passed for the Indian Army, and the two were expecting to be going at about the same time; they spent some time together on various projects. They tried to build a sizable balloon, but it proved a failure. The next attempt was something a little less ambitious—a canvas boat, constructed on a wooden framework; but this was no more successful. All the same they had enjoyed working together, even though the work had not led to anything in the way of successful results.

Ronald still wrote verse; he tried, too, to compose some songs, setting to music some of the favourite poems of such writers as Shelley, Longfellow and Thackeray.

All too soon, however, it was time to leave. It was actually on September 22, 1881, that Ronald Ross (then aged twenty-four) said good-bye to his parents and embarked on a great troopship, the Jumna, which was taking out soldiers for India, to replace others who had carried out their period of duty there and were due to come home.

The ship was very different from the Alsatia—and the voyage on which she was engaged was very different, too. The Jumna was a big ship, and she was very crowded. There was no attempt, as there had been on the Alsatia, to provide for the comfort of passengers. The ordinary soldiers were tightly packed on the lower decks; the medical men, including Ronald Ross, were given the task of looking after their health. On one occasion, when Ronald went below to see a man, he was not surprised to hear one sergeant, perspiring in the heat of the Red Sea, say: “This is what I call Hell.”

The voyage lasted about a month. The ship went through the Mediterranean, which was pleasant enough, through the Suez Canal, and down the Red Sea. The heat there was terrific; it was not made any better by the fact that the officers (with whom the doctors were classified) had to wear their official uniform at all times—and these uniforms, of thick woollen cloth, were designed for the English weather, and not for the climate of the tropics.

They were not even allowed to unbutton their tunics, which were fastened up to the neck.

This voyage was one of the most unpleasant journeys that Ronald Ross had ever made; day by day, as he leaned over the ship’s rail and looked at the sea, he wondered how long it would take. It seemed, indeed, well-nigh endless, though in actual fact it took only four weeks or so.

His posting was to Madras, where he was to work at the Station Hospital for British troops; but his first experience of India as an adult was to be Bombay, where he landed on October 23, 1881. He went ashore, thankful to be away from the heat and the crowded conditions of the ship. He was to spend the night at a Bombay hotel; and he went to sleep almost as soon as his head had touched the pillow.

When he woke the next morning he was very puzzled; there was a strange cawing sound echoing in his ears. As he sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes sleepily, he saw the reason for this—sitting on the rail at the foot of the bed was a huge crow. Indian crows are often very tame; but some people used to say that it was very unlucky to have one in your room.

However, Ronald was not superstitious; he shooed the bird out of the window and set about dressing. He had to start on a long train journey; in those days the journey from Bombay to Madras took a good three days. Again he found heat and overcrowding, and when he got to the station hospital where he was to work, he found, too, that there was a different sort of overcrowding there.

Someone in a high position had blundered, and had appointed too many junior doctors. Prospects of promotion was not very great, as there were so many of the younger men waiting for such posts as might be available; and, since there were a number of them, the amount of work for any one man to do was not great.

To begin with, Ronald found that he would have to do only about a couple of hours’ work each morning, examining some of the men who had been ill and who were now awaiting a medical examination, in order to be passed as fit for duty again. Occasionally (but only occasionally) he had also to take charge of an evening surgery; the senior medical officer, a kindly old Irishman, tried to share out the work between all the young assistants who had been sent to him—but nothing could alter the fact that there were too many of them, and that there was really not enough work to go around.

Living quarters were pleasant enough. To begin with Ronald stayed at Dent’s Garden Hotel, which was some distance from the hospital itself. It was a large house which had been turned into a hotel. Its rooms were like lofty great barns; there were cool bathrooms, with plentiful supplies of water, the verandas around were deep and shady, and there was, in fact, every effort to make living conditions as pleasant as they could be.

There were, of course, the drawbacks of life in a tropical climate. Squirrels squeaked in the grounds all night; crows cawed all day; and, night and day, there was the high-pitched buzz of the mosquitoes. Ronald soon came to see that his main task was looking after soldiers who had been stricken with malaria. He remembered that malaria case that had come his way in London; he remembered the mosquitoes in the Essex marshes; and he wondered, even as early as that, whether it would not be possible, one day, to show that there was some sort of connexion between the two things—the disease of malaria and the biting insects.

He was given an Indian servant—a thin, good-looking man called Apoo, who looked after his possessions well, who was capable and more honest than most servants at that time in India. Ronald was at first given a room on the first floor of the hotel; but he soon realized that it would be much more pleasant if he could move higher up. He found, after a time, that there was a vacant suite of rooms right at the top of the hotel, on the north side. He managed to move in, and now he had a wonderful view of the houses and trees of the town from a considerable height.

The sun did not penetrate into the room, as there was a large and deep veranda outside the window; and he kept the window open, so that he could work in a cooling breeze, even when the temperature outside was uncomfortably high.

As a child he had talked Hindustani to the servants; but he found now that he had completely forgotten the language. It was obligatory for the young doctors to pass an examination in Hindustani, though the standard set was not very high. Most of them, at some stage in their careers, would have to attend Indian patients, and it was therefore thought that they must know a little of the language which those patients, for the most part, would speak.

Ronald Ross always had many interests; his painting, his verse-writing and his music continued, but he now added to these hobbies the study of languages. His study of Hindustani, simple though it was, had given him an interest in the basis of languages generally; he therefore went to a bookshop in the town, and bought Italian, French, and German dictionaries and grammar-books. He thought that if he managed to master something of these modern languages, he would be able to read the great writers in the various languages for himself. In any case, he had not got enough to do in the way of medical work, and so he needed to have some mental occupation that would keep him interested. The languages did this for a while; though medical problems, too—especially the problems of the tropical diseases—nagged his mind and made him wonder why more research on these things had not been done by the English medical authorities in all their time in India.

CHAPTER SIX

THE TASK BEGINS

To BEGIN with Ronald was so happy to be in India, with his many new interests, that he did not bother very much about the actual job which he had come out to India to do. He was not worked very hard by the medical authorities; he did all that was required of him, which amounted only to two or three hours’ work each day; and as soon as the examining of sick men in the surgery was over he would hurry back to the hotel, say “Good-afternoon ” to a bearded old Armenian gentleman, a Mr. Aretoom, who was the only other person with rooms on the same landing—and then he would be busy with his verses or his music or his reading.

In the morning he would wake before dawn, jump out of bed and look up towards the stars that seemed to glitter in the Indian sky with a brighter radiance than he had known in England.

Then, in the spring of 1882, he was given another task for a few weeks—a task which brought him to a very different part of India. It was the medical charge of the 10th Madras Infantry, which was in camp not far from the railway terminus at Mysore. This station was high up in the mountains, and had a climate very different from the sticky heat of Madras itself. It was what some people called an Italian climate, and, the habit of getting up at or before dawn being now well established in Ronald’s mind, he used to get up and ramble over the mountain-side as the sun was rising. Then he came back for bath and breakfast, if there were no men seriously ill, or needing his attention, he would take some sandwiches and go out for a longer ramble.

He found little woods of fir-trees, not very different from some of those he had known in England; but the Indian peasants whom he sometimes saw driving their cattle over the sparse grass were very different from the South of England farm workers whom he had known in and around the Isle of Wight, Southampton and Portsmouth. When, years later, he came to write about this time, he found that he had forgotten all the medical work that he did—all that remained in his mind were the natural scenes that surrounded him—the rocky outcrops high up in the mountains, the rushing streams, the black pigs, the evil-looking crows that swept down towards him as he climbed. Everything else soon vanished from his memory, because the medical work was not of any real interest.

Later in that year of 1882 he went to yet another place, in charge of the 17th Madras Infantry. This was a little station called Vizianagram—again quite different. It was not far from the east coast, and he travelled there by a little coastal steamer, which took about three days. There was now a small hospital under his charge; and he found once more that many of his cases were of men suffering from malaria.

Again his mind returned to the past; he remembered his father’s bouts of fever; he remembered the woman from Essex and how scared she had been at his questionings in London; he remembered all sorts of things that he had dealt with in his other earlier work in India; and again he wondered. However, his writing still took more of his attention than his medical work. No very young doctor (and Ronald was still very inexperienced) can really do very much except give his patients the routine treatment, the routine drugs that are thought to be correct for the disease being treated; he cannot think very much for himself, because he has not got the necessary experience to work out a new course of treatment. It is only when he has treated a lot of cases of any particular disease that he finds himself wondering if the normal, ordinary treatment is good, and whether it may not be better to think of something quite new and revolutionary.

The time of Ronald Ross’s revolutionary treatment was not yet; but all the time he was storing away in his mind more and more knowledge of the disease of malaria, and of the symptoms of it, the way in which it was usually treated, and the comparative ineffectiveness of the treatment given.

Madras is a curious town. It is built on a flat coast, running almost due north and south. A near-stagnant stream, the Comb, moves very sluggishly towards the sea at one point, and here there was an old fort, surrounded by a high wall and a moat. Ronald was, on being given a more responsible post, moved from his comfortable quarters to rooms in this fort, where a regiment, with their wives and children, were also quartered.

He found it a change very much for the worse. The fort was very hot and stuffy; the fact that the pools of the river were stagnant not far away meant that the place was infested by mosquitoes, since these insects (as Ronald was soon to discover) breed in stagnant water.

Ronald whiled away his leisure time as best he could. In addition to his verse and his music he was now interested in science—not doing experiments in chemistry or physics, but reading about science and pondering on the meaning of what he read. He was thinking about the way in which the material universe is made up; he was reading what the scientists were saying about atoms and molecules; and, though he could know nothing of what was to come in the twentieth century in the way of the knowledge of atoms and their structure, he was penetrating, in his mind, very deeply into things that few young men of twenty-six would ever think about at all.

It was in 1883 that the dull routine of life at a small military station was changed; he was then given the job of Acting Garrison Surgeon at Bangalore, which was one of the finest stations in the South of India.

Bangalore is a large city and was then in the territory belonging to the Maharaja of Mysore; there was also a British official known as the Resident, and a large military and civil station, with soldiers and civil servants. It meant that at once Ronald had many more people to mix with, many more British people with whom he might make friends. In the centre of the British area there was a large plain for parades, riding, and playing such games as polo. There was a golf-course, a club, and a much busier social life than Ronald had encountered anywhere else.

The climate was pleasant, though there was a rainy season when it poured with rain for a short time. Otherwise it was warm—not too hot—which meant that, for once, there was not the complete preoccupation with malaria that had so possessed all the medical men in some of the places where Ronald had previously been stationed.

He bought a trap and a pony—a fast-trotting little animal; and now, for the first time, he found all his outside interests gradually sinking into the back of his mind, while the study of mosquitoes came to the front. To begin with, he did not connect these unpleasant little insects with malaria; he studied them, getting all sorts of specimens, and trying to see what they did, how they bred, why their bite was so irritating. It was more a matter of preventing the spread of insects that were a real nuisance than of curing or preventing a troublesome and sometimes deadly disease.

Ronald shared a bungalow with one of the officers. There were more mosquitoes there, it seemed to him, than there were in other parts of the town where he sometimes wandered. One day he was looking out of the window of his bedroom, admiring the view, when he saw a huge water-tub beneath the window. It was put out there in the rainy season, in order that the water might accumulate, and be used for watering the gardens when the weather was drier.

He looked at the water-tub for a time, without taking in what was really happening; then he suddenly leaned out excitedly. Buzzing around this water-tub were literally scores of mosquitoes. On the surface of the water he could see queer little things which he did not really understand or appreciate; then he realized that they might well be grubs or something of the kind, or maybe eggs—at any rate, he thought they must have something to do with the mosquitoes which came into the room at night and bit him so painfully.

He hurried out of the room, ran around the house, and found the water-tub; regardless of the fact that the water might be thought valuable, he tipped the tub up on end, poured the water on the ground, where it rapidly soaked in, and made his way back to his bedroom.

Now he looked out again; the little cloud of mosquitoes had vanished from sight. That night Ronald Ross slept better than he had done for a long time past; there was only an occasional mosquito in his room. The persistent high-pitched hum of their wings had stopped.

At breakfast next day he met his officer friend.

“I believe,” he said, “we could get rid of the mosquitoes here if we set about it in the right way.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” said the officer, knocking the top off his egg.

“I think that they breed in water,” Ronald explained.

“Do you?” His friend seemed to be almost bored by the suggestion, and went calmly on with his breakfast.

“ I upset the water-tub outside my window yesterday afternoon,” said Ronald; “there were hardly any mosquitoes in my bedroom last night. I’m sure that they were breeding in the water that was in that tub.”

“You think that they breed in the water?”

“Yes. There are a lot of tubs in the garden; no doubt there are a lot of mosquitoes coming from all of them. Even the flower-vases in the rooms may be breeding-grounds of mosquitoes,” he said argumentatively. “I believe that if we went carefully all over the place here, and saw that we didn’t have any sort of still, stagnant water anywhere, that we should cut down the number of mosquitoes terrifically.”

“Nonsense!” retorted the officer. “Anyhow, there is a sort of balance of nature, you know. No doubt God created mosquitoes for some good purpose, and it is our duty to bear with them and their bites. If we did destroy them all, it might well upset things, and something worse might come in their place.”

Ronald exploded at this argument, which seemed to him stupid. “If you say that,” he exclaimed, “you could apply the same argument to fleas or bugs; they breed wherever there is dirt; you might say that it is our duty not to have baths, because if we keep ourselves and our houses clean, the fleas and the bugs won’t come there to bite and torment us.”

“Oh, that’s quite different,” the officer said; and he would not listen to what Ronald had to say. It was not long after this that Ronald moved into a bungalow of his own; here he took good care to have no stagnant water, in tubs or vases, about the place. In consequence of this care, he was more free from mosquito bites than any of his friends or colleagues. He often argued with others about the way in which the mosquitoes could be kept under control; but he found that few of them would listen to his arguments; most of them did not appear to want to think about the problem at all.

He pondered a lot on this. He could not understand the apparent stupidity of some of his colleagues, both medical men and ordinary army officers; but he saw that there was, at the moment, little that he could do to convince them that they were mistaken in their ideas. Nothing made much impression on their minds.

Then, the next year, he was moved again. This frequent moving about in India he found irritating in some ways, but it probably did him a lot of good, in that he got experience of all sorts of different climates and different people. He also found, when he came to look back on it in later years, that it helped him, even in his study of mosquitoes, because he had come to see that there was more than one kind of mosquito. So many people thought of the mosquito just as a troublesome insect, and did not bother to think whether the name “mosquito” covered more than one thing.

The new move was to Quetta (where, years afterwards, there was to be a terrible earthquake disaster). His job was to take charge of the First Madras Pioneers, and to look after their health during a long journey. Even the journey to Quetta, which was in Baluchistan, Ronald found fascinating. He had to go by train to Bombay, and then by a steamer to Karachi. The steamer was almost empty, and it was a good thing that Ronald was now a good sailor, because the empty vessel rolled and tossed with every wave, so that the water almost came over the sides.

From Karachi he joined another train—a much more primitive affair, with wooden seats and very little in the way of comfort this time—that took him over the dry, hot plains of the Indus to Sibi, a small town at the mouth of the Bolan Pass. It was in October that he undertook this journey, in the middle of the hottest season of the year. Ronald had thought that he knew a good deal about the suffering from heat; but he had never undergone anything like this before.

On the last morning of the journey to Sibi the train crossed the Indus River by a bridge at a place called Jacobabad. The heat was now worse than ever, and for mile after mile, as he looked out of the window, the train seemed to be running along a narrow isthmus of sand, with huge marshy lakes extending away into the distance on each side of the line.

There was a British sergeant sitting opposite him in the train, and Ronald, in his friendly fashion, got into conversation with this man.

“What do you think these lakes are?” he asked at one point.

“I should think we’re running between two branches of the river,” the sergeant said.

“The Indus?”

“Yes.”

This went on for hour after hour. Ronald thought it was impossible that a railway line could have been built on a strip of sand, between two broad stretches of water, for mile upon mile, as it appeared to have been.

Then he peered out again. Above the surface of the water he could see a number of scrubby-looking bushes. Below the surface these bushes continued. At first he had thought that the part underneath the surface had been just reflexion; but now he saw that it was a continuation of the upper part. He could even see the afternoon sun reflected in the water. And yet—as suddenly became clear to him—the water was not really there at all. The ground was almost entirely barren desert; the railway line had been built, by some pioneering engineers, across this desert country, and what they had taken to be water was the most realistic mirage. The bushes had been, in a sense, cut in half by the layers of air in the hollows of dry sand.

Suddenly the train became cooler; the sun was sinking below the horizon and, just as they heaved a sigh of relief at the coolness, they ran into the terminus of the railway at Sibi.

From here they had to go by mule-train up to the Bolan Pass, in order to reach Quetta. Single mules would not be sent on this dangerous journey, so any traveler wishing to go on had to wait until there were enough to make a sizable group.

Ronald Ross stayed there for a week, waiting for the mule-train to be made up. This was quite the most uncomfortable week that he had ever spent in his life. Sibi was well known as one of the hottest spots in India, the temperature sometimes reaching as much as 140 degrees in the shade. While he was there shade temperatures of over 120 degrees were recorded. The military station was newly built; there was a pleasant garden, which was maintained, in spite of the heat, since a special canal had been cut to bring irrigation water from the river.

For some reason, too, there were swarms of dogs. They barked, howled and fought by day and night. Ronald had a bed for himself made up on the roof, since he thought it would be cooler. The dogs kept him awake for most of the night; but the native railway workers slept on the ground, and did not seem to be disturbed, either by the heat or by the din of the dogs.

It was a two-days’ journey to Quetta; the heat, again, was dreadful, and it was only by hitting the mules almost continually that they could be kept moving. Ronald did not like this, and thought it was cruel; but the Indians who drove the mule-train told him it was the only way that the train could be kept on the move at all.

They passed strange-looking figures on the way—tall, very handsome Baluchis, riding on small horses, dressed in colourful costumes, and armed with savage-looking knives and old-fashioned pistols. There were also very tall shepherds, in charge of flocks of scruffy-looking sheep. These men were swathed from head to heel in sheets; and only their noses could be seen, emerging from a fold of the sheet which was laid across the mouth as a guard against the dust-storms which were frequent. They passed through one great airless valley, in which (in spite of the apparent absence of wind) they could see what were sometimes called “dancing dervishes”—that is to say, vortices of dust, whipped up somehow by wind currents in odd corners of the valley.

Quetta itself was not very interesting. It was a small town of houses and huts. It lay in a flat valley, about 6,000 feet above sea-level, and was surrounded by dismal looking mountains. It was very hot in the daytime, and dust-storms were frequent. The dust got into eyes, nose, and throat; Ronald thought that the shepherds, wrapped up in their sheets, had perhaps been wise. In the evening it got cool, and during the night very cold indeed, so that they had to wrap up in warm blankets, and then sometimes they shivered; but Ronald thought that there was one thing to be thankful for—there were few mosquitoes. The cold nights were enough to ensure that these insects did not breed at this high altitude.

The meat they had to eat—especially the mutton from the mountain sheep—was the best that Ronald had eaten since leaving Europe; but the station was unhealthy. There was a lot of typhoid fever and dysentery; there was also a good deal of malaria, even though the mosquitoes did not seem as troublesome as they had been lower down. Just how they managed to survive the cold nights, to reappear as soon as the sun warmed the place up in the morning, Ronald never did discover.

He stayed there about ten days with the soldiers, and then the long journey downhill started. They marched to Sibi, taking it in fairly easy stages. Ronald had started to play the violin before embarking on this journey to Quetta; he had brought the instrument with him, and now, in his tent at night, he used to practise it. A beginner on a violin can produce the most excruciating noises, and he used to say that each time they pitched camp, his tent was put further and further away from the others, so that they should not have to suffer from the noises that he made.

At Sibi they had to wait a day or two for a suitable train, big enough to take the troops; Ronald went duck shooting. He had thought Sibi terribly hot when he had paused there on the way up, but now it seemed quite a pleasant place by comparison with Quetta.

All too soon (for he had enjoyed the journey) they were in Bangalore. His extensive files of papers about malaria had now grown fatter than ever, for he had treated many cases of the disease on this journey, and he began to wonder if he would ever get anything satisfactory in the way of complete knowledge of the disease. He was still sure that something could be done to prevent it, and to make it less trying and less dangerous when it struck. He found, too, that his old colleagues were still just as obstinate as before in the matter of destroying mosquitoes. He sighed as he thought of it; but he realized that, still a junior, there was very little that he could do to influence the ideas of those older men who had been in India for years.

CHAPTER SEVEN

TRAVELLING AGAIN

RONALD ROSS was not, however, to be allowed to settle down with his papers and his violin, his verses and his studies of science and mathematics. In January, 1885, he was told to go to Port Blair, in the Andaman Islands, about 400 miles from the great port of Rangoon. In the twentieth century Burma was to be separated from India, to become an independent country on its own; but in those Victorian days Burma was a part of the Indian Empire, and the military and medical services of the two countries were united.

A steamer went from Rangoon, with its pagodas and its tinkling temple bells, once a month to the Andaman Islands. The voyage took about thirty hours, and, with his lively interest in all that was going on around him, Ronald found his new surroundings fascinating.

The Andaman Islands are a strung-out archipelago of small rocky islets, their surface almost covered by thick jungle, and surrounded by sparkling sea. The sea foamed white where it roared over coral reefs, and between the reefs were calm blue lagoons, reflecting the tall trees. They gave Ronald a quite new background to his life— very different from anything which he had previously known.

The people were different, too. He had come to know various Indian races and tribes; but in the Andamanese forests there was a race of pygmies—tiny men, never more than five feet high, and as black as jet. They were nervous, and few white men had caught more than a glimpse of these tiny people as they peered out of the depths of the jungle.

At that time, too, Port Blair was a convict settlement; criminals from all parts of the Indian Empire were sent there. The Governor and the civil and military staff lived on Ross Island—which was really nothing more than a huge rock, about a hundred feet high, which stood at the mouth of the harbour. There was some shallow soil on this rock, which most of the English garrison managed to cultivate, so that the effect was of a lot of pretty houses, surrounded by pleasant little flower-gardens.

Ronald was very sorry when, after a few months in this pleasant place—a paradise after some of the places where he had recently been—he was transferred to Moulmein in Burma; but he soon found that this, too, was very beautiful. It was built around the beds of four slow-moving rivers; between the rivers there were small hills, usually with pagodas or other oriental buildings glittering in the bright sunlight.

This again, was quite different from anywhere else he had been; the sky was always blue, the bells from the temples tinkled in the breeze, and when he wandered around the dockside area, Ronald was fascinated by the huge lumbering elephants, directed by little Burmese drivers, lifting huge baulks of timber and loading them on to wagons.

Once again he found that the medical work was not very onerous. He was in charge of the health of a regiment; but the climate was much healthier than it had been at any station in India where he had served, which meant that he had not as much to do in the way of surgery work. He shared a bungalow with Captain Kirkpatrick of the Ninth Madras Infantry, and spent a very happy year. Ronald’s Indian servant, Apoo, who had been to Quetta with him, shivering in the cold of the Himalayan nights, now felt much happier; Ronald somehow contrived to get his piano sent on, all the way from Madras, and strange music sometimes greeted the ears of Burmese who had never before seen a European musical instrument.

There was still, sometimes, great heat to be endured; but it did not seem as bad, here in Burma, as it had been in the various Indian stations. There were some very good snipe roaming wild on the outskirts of Moulmein, especially in the swampy areas around the slowest-flowing parts of the rivers. Here they used to go shooting, sometimes wading knee-deep in the water in the blazing sun and somehow contriving to ignore the bites of the mosquitoes and other insects.

Two or three evenings a week, they played polo, and in the later part of the evening, when it became too dark to play polo outdoors, there was always the English club, with dancing and cards.

For a time Ronald had the interesting experience of taking charge of the Civil Hospital in Moulmein. Ever since coming to the East, he had been concerned with soldiers; but now the Civil Surgeon, who looked after the health of the ordinary people, went on leave, and Ronald Ross took over the place.

He found a number of patients there suffering from many different diseases. Quite a number of them needed only a small surgical operation to be able to leave the hospital and resume their ordinary lives. Ronald carried out these operations—by this time he was a very capable surgeon—and said that when the Civil Surgeon returned he was quite annoyed that a number of his patients had vanished, because Ronald Ross’s surgical skill had cured them.

There was a wealthy young Mohammedan in the town who was sent to him one day; he was supposed to be suffering from some strange kind of fits.

“Why have you come to me?” Ronald asked him.

“My priest has sent me.”

“Why?”

“My priest spins a wheel; then he reads the meaning of the wheel; and the meaning of the wheel was that I should come to you.” This was the only explanation that the young man could give. Ronald had a mental picture of a kind of roulette wheel, with names instead of numbers, though he said that it might merely have been that his skill with the surgeon’s knife had spread through Moulmein, and that the priest had thought that such a skilful surgeon might be able to do something for the unfortunate young man.

All that was the trouble, Ronald found, was a kind of parasite in the young man’s intestines. He gave him large doses of castor-oil, and after that the fits did not come on—and the skill of the young doctor was praised more highly than ever. He found that large numbers of civilians flocked around him; he had a kind of outpatients’ surgery at the hospital, and from this time onwards life was always an extremely busy matter.

In May, 1886, however, he had to give all this up, being transferred back to the Andaman Islands again. He had been sorry to leave them for Moulmein; he now was equally sorry to be going back. Now, however, he realized that in addition to his work on mosquitoes, which continued steadily, he would have, on the islands, to make his own amusements more than he had done in the past. He bought an old open ship’s boat, with mainsail and jib, and hired two convicts who were allowed out of the penal settlement, since they had behaved themselves well, to help him in sailing it. He also brought one of his polo ponies across from Rangoon, stabled it on the mainland shore more or less opposite Ross Island, and spent his morning, when the surgery was over, either in riding or sailing.

One day a small party set out in a government-owned steamer, the Nancowry, to sail around the islands for a few days. They had managed, somehow, to persuade five of the little Andamanese natives to come with them. These pygmy people were pleasant enough, if treated properly—almost like pets. It was curious, Ronald thought, to watch the way in which they looked at the marvels of the steamer. They had clearly never before been on a ship of this kind. When the engines started up with a roar, the little coloured men looked at them with awe and wonder. For some five minutes or so they stood by at the entrance to the engine-room, their eyes wide open in astonishment. Then they seemed to take no more interest in the engines.

Ronald showed them how to use a burning-glass, to focus the rays of the sun on a piece of paper and set it alight. Again they were for a short time fascinated at seeing the paper smoulder and in the end burst into flame; but the interest, again, did not last. The lack of real interest or understanding, he thought, was just like that of a cat or dog, which will watch its master for a while, without really knowing what he is trying to do.

Yet they were very clever in their own way. They could shoot fish with bows and arrows; and one day Ronald, watching them idly, saw one of the little men suddenly plunge overboard, carrying a boathook. In a few moments he was back on board, with the boathook firmly fixed in the shell of a turtle. This was in the glare of the midday sun; the turtle had been under the surface of the glittering water. The white men had not caught even a glimpse of it.

Ronald had some happy times on the Andaman Islands, then; there was an old wooden pier at the place on Ross Island where the British used to land when they had been ashore on the mainland. Here they used to spend many a peaceful hour, fishing. One day Ronald noticed that there were four layers of fish—minnows near the surface, fish about six inches long just below, two- or three-foot fish below this, and real monsters at the bottom. Each of these layers of fish used to feed on the ones above. On one occasion one of the British soldiers managed to catch one of the biggest of the fish from the deepest bottom, and found that it weighed more than ninety pounds.

Ronald’s interest in malaria and in mosquitoes did not disappear during his time on the Andaman Islands; but there were not so many of the insects in that somewhat cooler climate, and so his files of information did not grow as much, during the year that he spent there, as they had done before.

His happy spell on the island came to a sudden end when the regiment whose health he was looking after was suddenly ordered to Madras City in 1887. He was then about thirty years of age; he thought, sometimes, that he really had not done very much in the first thirty years of his life, for he did not know that much of what he had been doing was, before long, to lead him to some sensational discoveries which were to bring him lasting fame.

At any rate, it was clear, as soon as the move to Madras was mooted, that his life was again to have a great change. He sold his boat; but he thought that he would be able to take his polo pony with him. Indeed, almost as soon as he reached Madras, he bought two more. All this time he had managed to keep healthy; in seven years he had had no illness, except German measles, which, a year or two before, he had caught from a patient.

At Royapetta, a suburb of Madras, he lived in a small bungalow near the rice-fields. Again the weather was damp and hot; the Indian crows, which he had almost forgotten in his Burmese days, seemed to be looking in at the windows, mocking him. He got very depressed, thinking that he was wasting his life, doing nothing that was worth while.

Then, in 1888, he was granted a year’s furlough, back to England for a spell. This had been due to him after five years’ Indian service; but until he made a fuss, threatening to resign if it were not granted, no one had done anything about it.

He found the Isle of Wight not very much altered (his parents were still living at Ryde); but he was not to be content to have a lazy year at home before returning to India. The Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons had combined to start a new examination for what was called the Diploma in Public Health; and this he resolved to get. He succeeded; but he later said that it was due more to his mathematics than to his medicine, because there was one question dealing with population, which he solved, getting the correct answer, by some abstruse mathematical theory that he had taught himself in India. “I believe,” he said once in his old age, “that this was the only occasion when my mathematics has been of the slightest service to me!”

In 1889, before returning to India, Ronald got married, and he and his bride (Rose Bloxam) lived in rooms at Reigate in Surrey. The Indian authorities had granted him an extension of his leave in order to take a special course in bacteriology under Professor Klein at London University; Ronald deplored the fact that in the lovely days of the summer of 1889 he had to leave the country around Reigate and travel up to London to peer down microscopes, to study the incubation of germs and the way in which they could be grown. It was not to be long, however, before he was to find all this of the greatest possible value in the malarial research which was really to be his life-work.

In 1889 he was the first member of the Indian Medical Service to gain the Diploma in Public Health and to study bacteriology.

During his spell in the Andaman Islands, too, he had written a novel, called Child of Ocean. He tried to interest various publishers in this, at first without success; in 1889 it was published, but the publishers made the mistake of trying to make it look like a boys’ book. It was actually intended for grown-ups, and they had a cover printed for it with a pirate (“with his nose where his ear ought to be,” Ronald Ross pointed out) shooting at a boy on the bowsprit of a ship.

Before the book came out, Ronald Ross and his wife were on their way back to India. He was carrying with him a boxful of specimens from the London laboratory of Professor Klein. He was now resolved that he would embark on some worthwhile medical research work. No longer would he fritter away his energies in all the hobbies which had occupied him in past years. He still wanted to write; but his music and many other things on which he had been spending much time he was now resolved to push on one side. Mathematics, chemistry, and other scientific pursuits which had occupied him before were now to take up his time no more; they might be interesting, he told himself, but they were not for him. Now he was to be the medical man or nothing. Malaria, with all its ill effects on its victims, needed to be conquered. He had long thought it to be the worst, because the most widespread, of all the tropical diseases; he was sure that something could be done about it.

If nothing could be done, he was certain that the white man would never really be the master of the tropical countries, for when nearly all white men suffered from a fever—a fever, moreover, that might recur at fairly frequent intervals—there was little chance of their working steadily and systematically through the years. Always the man in charge of some important project would be falling sick—and then the project would go wrong.

So often Ronald Ross had seen this happen; and so often he had come to realize that a simple, inexpensive way of dealing with malaria would pay for itself over and over again.

But how to find it? It was with the idea of finding some sort of solution to this malaria problem that he had spent those lovely days of an English summer in the London laboratories; and what he had learned there he was soon to apply in the tropics.

Not at once, however; for as soon as he arrived at Madras he was told to report for duty at Rangoon. A regiment of Madras Infantry had been on an expedition in Burma, suppressing a rebellion in difficult jungle territory; they had no fully qualified medical man in charge, and Ronald Ross had to hurry there, since his presence might mean the saving of many lives. In all these eastern military campaigns, there were more lives lost through illness than through the actions of the enemy; the presence of a doctor who knew a good deal about tropical diseases was therefore the first essential. In spite of the fact that many more doctors had been recruited, there were, on occasion, not enough of them available. This was one of the occasions of medical scarcity, and therefore Ronald was ordered to Burma.

It was a difficult moment for him. He had been married only a few months; his wife (who had never before been quite alone in the world, among strangers) had been in India only a few hours; and now he had to go chasing off to the Burmese jungle, leaving her in a Madras hotel, among complete strangers—very much the stranger in a strange land. The very people in the streets looked odd to her—and yet it was impossible, to begin with, at any rate, for her to come to Burma, for no one knew, as yet, if there would be fighting. No one knew, either, what the conditions would be like as regards health and fitness; however, it was soon possible for her to travel to Burma, though not, of course, to be with her husband on his marches through the jungle.

She was sent to a place called Pakoko, which was the base of the military operations, well away from any sort of fighting. It was a smallish village on the bank of the River Irawadi, not far from the famous city of Mandalay. Here Ronald was able to spend some of his time with her, though he was, from time to time, ordered to join some soldiers who might be hard pressed.

Pakoko, in the wet season, which was on when they arrived, was green and fragrant; brightly-coloured flowers were everywhere to be seen; and even the marches out into the jungle were memorable to Ronald, with the jungle trees covered in crimson blossoms and the brightly-coloured tropical birds flitting among them.

When the hot season came, it was not so pleasant—and Mrs. Ross had to spend the hot season in Pakoko. The green grass soon vanished; the fields surrounding the place became brown and dusty; and the heat was more intense than anything that she had ever endured in her life.

This spell in Burma lasted some months; Ronald again found himself dealing with sick, rather than wounded, soldiers. Malaria again occupied his mind. Though his specimens from London had been left behind in India, he found that he was now applying the knowledge which had come his way while he was peering down the microscopes of the London laboratory.

His first satisfaction—-and his first real reward—was soon to come, however. In April 1890 his ordeal in Burma was to come to an end. He was ordered to go back to India, to the first really good post (apart from temporary ones) which had been offered him. He had been appointed Staff-Surgeon at Bangalore, his old post under a new name. Now, at long last, he told himself, he would be able to get down to something worth while in the way of medical research.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE MALARIA MENACE

IT HAD actually been during the period in Burma, just before being appointed Staff-Surgeon at Bangalore, that Ronald had realized that there was something more valuable in the study of mosquitoes than just getting information about an odd and interesting insect.

He had already found that there were two main varieties of mosquito. He called them the grey and the brindled mosquitoes, owing to their colour. He had tried to get some books which would tell him all the facts about the insects, but it seemed that there were no really good books on the subject; or, if there were, that they could not be obtained in India, through any of the booksellers whom he knew.

At Bangalore, when he settled there, he found less malaria than he had known in some other stations. There were other fevers, however, in some ways more dangerous than malaria. Especially were there diseases due to the use of impure and infected water, since there was no piped water supply in Bangalore, and all sorts of germs found their way into the wells from which water for drinking, washing, cooking, or any other purpose, had to come. For a time Ronald thought that there might be a malaria germ which infected the intestines of human beings; he even wrote some articles suggesting this, which were published in the medical journals.

He called this disease “enteroseptic fever”, and tried to discover the microbe that caused it. All the time, too, he was studying the blood of feverish patients.

It had been known since 1880 (when it was first discovered by that French doctor called Laveran) that malaria was caused by some germ in the blood. All sorts of people had tried to find this germ; some of them thought that they had found it, under the microscope, but it had been always proved that they were wrong. The object that they had thought to be the germ of malaria turned out to be something that naturally occurred in the blood of healthy people, and did them no harm.

Ronald now had a first-rate microscope; he had, since his year in London, had some first-class training in bacteriology; he was, therefore, in a position to study any tropical disease which might have come under his observation.

He studied the blood of many patients; whenever he had a patient who suffered from malaria, he would take a small specimen of the patient’s blood, and examine it under his microscope. He was able to show that what other doctors had thought to be the germs of malaria were really nothing of the sort. After a time he began to wonder if the whole idea that malaria was caused by a germ in the blood was a mistake.

At this time, then, he was working hard at his microscope, even though he was also writing. He wrote verses and stories; some of them were published and some were not. At one time he even thought of giving up his medical career and becoming a writer only. If he had done that, there might have been very fine reading for the public; but, for the health of the world, it is certainly a very good thing that he did nothing of the sort.

In 1892 Ronald’s father died. His son received the news by telegram from England, and he was, naturally, very upset at it. He was soon due to go home again on leave, and thought that it would be a very difficult leave to endure, since he had been much looking forward to telling his father of his work on malaria. The leave, spent in England during 1894 and 1895, was a fairly sad time. By this time Ronald had children of his own, and he was unhappy to think that his father never saw his grandchildren; also this time he had not the stimulus of the bacteriological work which had been so interesting on his previous leave. It was almost with relief that he returned to India in March, 1895. He left his wife and children at home. His son, Ronald Campbell Ross, had been born only a few days before Ronald sailed.

It was during this period, from 1895 onwards, that his study of malaria and the mosquito really began to bring results.

When Ronald Ross started his work, there was really surprisingly little known about the disease and its cause. It was for a long time thought that malaria was produced by some kind of bad air arising from swampy and marshy ground—indeed, the name mal-aria means “bad air”. This was an understandable mistake, since (as we know nowadays) mosquitoes, which really carry malaria, breed on such ground.

Many people, however, including Ronald Ross, had been able to prove that the idea of malaria being somehow conveyed in the air from swamps was quite wrong. For one thing, if it were so, almost everyone who lived near a swamp or a marsh would catch the disease, and this was by no means true. As long ago as 1847 it had been shown that people suffering from malaria had some little black grains in their blood; it was thought that these were living germs of some sort, but just what they were the doctors of fifty years had not been able to prove.

It was the French doctor, Laveran, who showed that the granules seemed to exist inside the red corpuscles of the blood. There are millions of these little red corpuscles in the blood of every human being; they are what gives the blood its red colour, and if there were known to be a germ which infected them, it would clearly cause a highly unpleasant disease. These little black granules, Ronald had been able to prove, gradually grew inside the red corpuscles, until they filled the whole space of the corpuscles; then they split apart and formed spores, which could, in their turn, infect other red corpuscles. This was the way in which the fever built up in the body of the patient.

Ronald Ross’s long and patient study, up to about 1895, had got him thus far. He thought, then, that this was the whole story—that there was a germ which got into the body, which infected some red corpuscles of the patient, filled them with black granules, burst, and infected more. This was a type of malaria parasite, which came to be called Plasmodium.

Laveran had shown that, in addition to this kind of thing, there was something else also happening in the blood of infected patients. In the serum (the clear fluid of the blood, in which the corpuscles float) there were a number of separate granules floating about; now and then these whizzed around, and sometimes long, stringy pieces seemed to come out of them, wriggling about, as if they were trying to escape. Laveran called these things flagella (like the arms of some small organisms which can be seen if stagnant pond water is examined under a microscope).

Laveran also showed that these things were found in malaria patients, but not in healthy people. He knew that they were something to do with the disease, therefore; but he was not able to work out the way in which they developed, nor to show if they had any kind of direct connexion with the plasmodium inside the red corpuscles; the whole process was very complicated and was not at all easy to understand. It was because it was such a complex affair that successive generations of doctors spent so much time trying to work out a theory that would explain it all, a theory which would, in the end, enable some method of preventing or curing the disease to be devised.

At this time there was no established idea of the connexion of the parasites in the blood of people suffering from malaria with the bites of mosquitoes; it is the peculiar glory of Ronald Ross that he was the first man to tie the whole story together.

There were many doctors, working in tropical countries, who tried to show how these parasites got into the blood of patients; some of them, remembering that malaria occurred near marshes and swamps, tried to show that the parasites grew in stagnant water; some of them thought that it might be a small organism of some sort which was floating about in the water, and which a human being might get into his body by drinking the water, or by eating food that had been cooked in it.

Some people had a vague idea that insects might have something to do with it. One of Ronald’s friends, a Dr. Kennan, told him that he had found an old law in Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa, which said that all the inhabitants would have to keep the road in front of their houses and plots of land in good condition, so as to prevent water accumulating, since stagnant pools “generate disease and mosquitoes over the town”. This law was made compulsory in 1812—which seems to indicate that there were people, as long ago as that, who thought that there was some connexion between mosquitoes and some of the more widespread tropical diseases.

Ronald knew, when he returned to India in 1895, that it was probable that malaria was caused by a parasite in the blood. With his invaluable microscope, he had even watched these parasites. He had injected people with blood from malarial patients, and had shown that these injections produced the symptoms of the disease in people who had been healthy. He did not even guess at this stage, however, how the parasites passed from the sick person to the healthy one in natural conditions. It was easy enough for a doctor to take a few drops of blood from one person’s veins and inject it into another; but did Nature have anything like a hypodermic syringe, which doctors use for such simple operations? That was the great problem that Ronald Ross had to face—and it took him years of careful, painstaking work before he got anything like a satisfactory answer to it.

It should be clear that this was a problem which few doctors in India had even thought about. Ronald Ross did not do his work on malaria as part of the normal procedure of an Army doctor; he did it in his spare time and at his own expense. His only job, as regards malaria, for which he was paid, was to give his patients the necessary doses of quinine, to look after them when they were ill, and to see them on the way to recovery. The service for which he was working did not think that it was in any way part of his job to study mosquitoes (though he did this continuously for years), nor to see if he could find some way of preventing this disease of malaria, which cost so many lives and lost so many hours of work to the thousands of white men who were then employed in India and in many other tropical countries.

While he had been in London he had called on Dr. Patrick Manson (afterwards Sir Patrick Manson), a great authority on tropical diseases, and had been shown specimens of the various parasites, in the blood of patients in the Seamen’s Hospital at the Royal Albert Dock— men who had caught the disease when on some voyage in the tropics, but who had not been treated for it until after their return to England. This had been the only worthwhile experience of his year’s furlough in England; but it had been enough to stimulate him to think more and more about the problem when he got back to India again.

Just before leaving England in March, 1895, Ronald had been awarded a prize offered for the best essay on malaria. The prize consisted of a gold medal and seventy-five guineas in cash.

He did not worry much about the cash; he was proud to own the medal; even more he was delighted to have the honour. It meant that, even though he was a long way off the final solution of the problem, he was probably nearer to it than any other medical man of his day—and this encouraged him to go on with the work as soon as he got back into a country where he would be likely to be faced with a fair number of patients suffering from the disease.

He was now stationed at Secunderabad, in the area called the Deccan. The ground was dry and sandy, with only the scrub of the desert to be seen in the way of natural vegetation. The season was hot; but, as usual, there was a club where Ronald could enjoy his spare hours, and he shared a pleasant bungalow with two officers, Captain Thomas and Lieutenant Hole, both of whom soon became his very good friends. He played golf, on a course which had very little grass; but he did not try to get polo ponies, as he thought that now he had made his name as an expert on malaria, the authorities might well be sending him all over the place, studying the disease.

Everything he was doing he now reported back to Patrick Manson in London. Manson knew what Ross was trying to achieve, and was, moreover, probably the greatest expert in the world. During the four years from 1895 to 1899, he wrote 110 letters to Manson, which have been carefully preserved. They give the most complete story which is known of the day-to-day progress of a job of medical research. Doctors working on tropical diseases have found them of intense interest ever since, for Ross published many of them in his Memoirs, which appeared in 1923.

He was now taking specimens of blood from every patient he could find; but he discovered another difficulty, and that was that most people had been given huge doses of quinine, and it appeared that quinine tended to destroy the parasites. This, of course, was the reason why it had been so much used to treat malaria; but it also meant that if a patient had been given considerable doses, it was much more difficult to detect the parasites (either in the blood corpuscles or floating about freely in the serum of the blood). Ross showed, in any case, that when the parasites could not be found in any quantity, the patient very quickly recovered.

In his first letter to Manson, written on May 1, 1895, he reported that he examined five patients in one ward, taking specimens of their blood. They had all had quinine; but he found some parasites in the blood of three of them. The two who had no parasites were getting better; they were discharged from hospital the next day.

He already suspected that mosquitoes had something to do with the spread of the disease; he was trying to catch some mosquitoes, in order to study them, but to begin with, he found this a very difficult operation.

He set out to breed mosquitoes in captivity. Then, when he had some available, he would put a patient lying on a bed, with a fine mosquito net over him, release one or two mosquitoes inside the net, and instruct the patient to let them bite him. It was, perhaps, just as well that Dr. Ross was an Army doctor, and that his patients were, for the most part, soldiers. A civilian patient might have objected to being made the subject of an experiment of this kind—but it was only by doing this that he could be sure of what was happening.

Another problem—a very unexpected one this time—was that sometimes it was difficult to get the mosquitoes to bite the patient when he wanted them to.

“All the cases are beautiful,” he wrote to Manson. “I am wild with excitement; but these mosquitoes! They will not bite! I tried them on myself for experiment, but having been caught they are frightened, I suppose. I expect a crop of new ones in one of my bottles this evening, and hope a fever case will show itself to suit.”

Then, a day or two later, he put in the sun some bottles in which he had the grubs out of which the mosquitoes came; he found that the extreme heat had killed them all, and had to start again. All this had to be done in his spare time, with his normal hospital duties going on at the same period. He had to attend normal surgeries; he had to examine soldiers who had gone sick, and decide when they were fit to go back on duty; he had to visit ill people in their homes; and then, when he had done all his work in the Military Hospital, he would go to the Civil Hospital, to see if there were malaria cases there, cases which would provide him with more and more blood specimens, to see if the parasites, in one or other of their puzzling forms, could be detected.

It was not unlike a detective story, indeed. The clues were very difficult to find, and, when found, very difficult to understand and interpret; and, unlike the Scotland Yard man, Ross had to pay his witnesses. He used to prick the finger of a patient and squeeze out a drop or two of blood for study; many of the Indians in Secunderabad, when it became known that Dr. Ross was interested in studying specimens of blood, said that they would let him prick their finger if he paid them a rupee a time. Even then they sometimes ran away, if they thought the little operation was likely to be at all painful.

He looked at hundreds of specimens at this time; sometimes he found parasites, sometimes he did not.

The whole long and weary piece of research seemed to be dragging on to an indefinite conclusion. Sometimes he was wildly excited, when results appeared to be well on the way; sometimes he was very dismal and despondent, when it seemed that there were to be no useful results at all. When he got back home to his bungalow and sat down, weary and almost exhausted, he would get out pen and paper, write long and chatty and descriptive letters to Manson, and feel that, after all, the task was worth while, if only in that it kept him in touch with one of the greatest doctors of the world.

Manson wrote back, too, though not all of his letters have survived. He did his best to encourage Ross, congratulated him when there were results that seemed to be worth while, and commiserated with him when things seemed to go wrong.

CHAPTER NINE

SUCCESS IN SIGHT

THE PROBLEM seemed impossible to solve. There were different kinds of parasites which Dr. Ross had found; some of these were little spheres, or balls; some of them were shaped like crescents; some of them seemed to penetrate into the red corpuscles and some of them seemed just to float about in the blood. The thing was so complicated that he often felt he would never see the end of the task which he had set himself.

Once he thought that the crescents were changing into spheres; then he wrote to Manson: “I must satisfy myself much more, however, before I state so definitely.” Then he ended his letter by saying: “I am dead beat now, and the lids of my right eye are swollen and painful—at work from 7 a.m. to 7.30 p.m., with snatches at breakfast and tea.”

There can have been few men—even scientific researchers—who have done their work in such conditions. All the time there was never a complaint as to his ordinary, routine work, even though his interest was no longer in it. Whenever he had a patient to examine now, he asked himself only one question: “Has he got malaria?” If the patient had some other disease, he was, of course, adequately treated; but Ross found that he had now no other real interest but the malaria problem.

“I want to try an experiment,” he wrote. “Keep an infected mosquito for a week in a bottle containing water, and then drink water and mosquito together. But it ought to be tried systematically. I shall get a number of mosquitoes in bottles tomorrow.”

It is clear from this that he was already thinking that the mosquitoes might have the parasites in them; and he next tried to get mosquitoes which had actually got human blood in them.

He gave patients instructions; they had to let the mosquitoes, when they had bitten the patient, fill themselves completely. Ross stood by, with a pair of tweezers in his hand. As the mosquito filled its stomach with a few drops of blood, he would grab it, squeeze the stomach with the tweezers, and get the blood on the slide of a microscope; then he could examine it at once, and see if there was any possibility of detecting the various parasites in the contents of the mosquito’s stomach.

He knew that mosquitoes fed on human blood; and he thought that it might be possible that the parasites from the patient might be transferred to the insect.

It was on May 22, 1895, that he got, by this means, the first perfect specimen of mosquito blood. It had been sucking for nearly twenty minutes, and his patient had somehow managed to control himself for all this time—he must have been much tempted to give the mosquito a hearty smack. Ross saw that parasites were there in huge numbers—far more than when he took a few drops from a patient’s finger. They were all nearly perfect spheres; there were few of the crescents; nor (much to his surprise) were there any of the flagella, which had been seen, waving about, with a good many of the parasites in most specimens that had been examined.

An hour later he repeated the experiment with another mosquito, and found just the same thing. There were only seven crescents in one case, but eighty spheres. A specimen of blood taken from a patient’s finger, by his usual method, showed thirty-nine crescents and only ten spheres.

Here again was another puzzle; it looked as if something different was happening in the mosquito from what happened in the blood of the human being. It was not easy to work out; but somehow he knew that he would have to do so. That it would take years he did not realize at that time; if he had realized the length of the task, he might well have given up in despair. All the same, Ronald Ross was the sort of man, who, having taken on a task, is prepared to carry it out to the bitter end, no matter how long it may take, and how hard it may be.

Within about a month of starting work seriously, however, Ross had already established a number of important facts with regard to malaria. He had come to the definite conclusion that there was more than one stage in the development of the malaria parasite. The human-blood stage involved something in the nature of a dividing-up of a parasite; there was an intrusion of the spheres (and perhaps the crescents) into the red corpuscles of the blood, and this led to the production of spores which could infect more corpuscles. What happened in the stomach of the mosquito was in the nature of a combining of different types of parasite, to make the sort that grew in the human blood. The change of the crescent, with the flagella pushing out, into something different, took place here. It was a fascinating story, something unexpected and something which, to begin with, he could not attempt to understand.

At any rate, he knew that the crescents disappeared quickly after getting inside the mosquitoes. Within half an hour, he discovered, the crescents had vanished and the spheres had taken their place. He was also sure that there were two ways in which the parasite could change— by splitting into spores, which were more or less crescentlike in shape; and by pushing out the flagella. These flagella, it seemed, did not exist very long either; half an hour later, they would all be gone.

About this time he received an interesting invitation. One of the Indian Princes—the Maharaja of Patiala in the Punjab—wrote to the Government asking if Dr. Ross could be loaned to him for a few months to study the fevers which were so widespread in his country. “What an opportunity!” he wrote to Manson. “But the Government may possibly object.”

Manson wrote encouragingly. “If you would experiment,” he wrote once, “create an artificial marsh by allowing the water in which the mosquito has laid her eggs and in which her progeny have been swimming about to dry up, then pulverize this and get someone to inhale the dust you stir up from it. Or drink it suspended in water. The experiment would be interesting, but perhaps not altogether safe. But don’t do it yourself!”

In June, 1895, Ross tried the experiment. He took four mosquitoes which had sucked the blood of a patient suffering from malaria; he put these in bottles of water. In a few days they were found dead on the surface of the water, and some very small mosquito grubs were there as well—showing that the eggs had been hatched out.

The water in this bottle was given to a native—a man called Lutchman. Ross paid him some money for taking part in the experiment, and explained what the experiment was. Lutchman was a healthy young man. He said that he had never had malaria in his life, though Ross (in reporting the experiment to Manson in London), stressed that this was only a statement by the man, which might or might not be true. However, the experiment of giving the man the dose of what might be called mosquito liquor was carried out—though not the original threat of drinking the dead mosquitoes with the water. He was at least spared that.

Ross wrote to Manson: “I think myself justified in making this experiment because of the vast importance a positive result would have, and because I have a specific in quinine always at hand.” He felt, in other words, that if there appeared to be any likelihood of Lutchman getting seriously ill, he could always be given a dose of quinine, when there would almost certainly be an instant cure.

For a few days nothing happened. Lutchman went on with his work as if he had not swallowed the water. Then, exactly eleven days after drinking the water, he came around to the hospital.

“I’ve got a headache,” he told one of the assistants at the hospital. Ross was at once sent for. He looked at Lutchman and thought that the man looked decidedly unwell. His temperature was 99.8°, which is a little above normal. This was at eight o’clock in the morning.

“Stay here,” Ross told him. “You can rest, and we shall want to take your temperature every half hour, and also take specimens of your blood.”

Lutchman looked a little alarmed at this. “Blood?” he asked.

“Just a little prick in your finger,” Ross reassured him. “It won’t hurt at all; and it will be only a drop or two of blood that we shall want to take.”

The man agreed. His temperature was taken every half hour; by midday it had risen from 99.8° to over 101°, then it fell a little again. Blood specimens were also taken at intervals, and examined under the microscope. Few if any parasites, however, were found in the blood, which was a surprising and rather disappointing result.

Actually the temperature of the man Lutchman continued above normal for three days; then it gradually went down, and the man came back to normal health.

The experiment was repeated with two other men, who were also paid for taking part in the work; but in these cases there was no rise in temperature and no parasites. The experiment seemed to be more or less of a failure, though Lutchman seemed to be an interesting pointer to new lines of work.

Ronald felt worried. He had thought that he was going to get quick and certain results; it now began to look as if the job was going to be a much longer affair than he had originally thought it was likely to be. He offered financial rewards to hospital assistants who would give him access to malarial patients; he thought by doing this he would increase the number of blood specimens under examination, and the more patients whose blood he could examine, the better opportunity he would have of working out a general theory of how malaria was caused and how it might be prevented.

“I will bet,” he wrote to Manson, “on your suggestion that malaria is in the first place a disease of mosquitoes—hence the idea of it being carried by winds. It is the mosquito and not the germs which are carried by the wind. They probably deposit the germs in the drinking water. That is why I am beginning to work with drinking water instead of with an artificial marsh as you suggest.”

At this time, in fact, Ross thought that he was proving that the people infected were those who had by chance drunk water from a pot (the water supply of India was not piped) which had been infected by mosquito eggs having been laid in it. The infected mosquito, of course, might have been blown from a marsh where many of the mosquitoes had been infected by the disease, or it might have bitten a malarial patient. At this time he did not think that either of these problems of infection of mosquitoes with the parasite or their transport to human water supplies mattered very much; he thought that the important point was (as in a sense was true) that malaria was a disease of mosquitoes, which the insects might transmit to human beings.

Meanwhile there had been some trouble over the invitation of the Indian Prince, the Maharaja of Patiala, who had wanted Ross to undertake an investigation of malaria and other tropical fevers in his territory. It has already been seen that Ronald Ross was attracted by the idea, though he was doubtful whether the Government would approve the scheme.

The Government did, indeed, veto the scheme, largely on grounds of expense, and so Ross had to drop the idea. He learned afterwards, however, that he would have gained little in the way of valuable experience; his station at Secunderabad gave him wider scope, really, than Patiala would have done. He might have gained financially, since his regimental pay was still low, and his researches were costing him money; but otherwise he would have gained very little.

All this time Manson was thinking about the malaria problem in London. Towards the end of June 1895 he wrote to Ross, suggesting that he should evaporate the water in which some mosquitoes had died, send the sediment to England, where some water should be added to the dried sediment, and that it should then be drunk. “I am willing to try,” Manson said. He added that he would also be quite prepared to try his other suggestion, of pulverizing the sediment, or even the bodies of the diseased mosquitoes, and inhaling the dust through the nostrils. If the result was to produce malaria, it would, he thought, be quite a conclusive result, proving the malaria germs were contained in the bodies of mosquitoes or in their eggs.

“My idea,” Manson said, “about the beast in the mosquito is that it is transmitted in a sort of hereditary way from mother mosquito to sons and daughters as a cell parasite, that it gets to man in mosquito dust—the debris of dead mosquitoes in which the germ has become encysted, that these germs on entering the human mouth, air passages, or swallowed in the saliva or what not, or, as in your experiment in water, penetrate the human, and so get into his circulation.”

This was an idea which Ross thought very interesting indeed; in the end he was to show that it was by no means correct, but in 1895 he found any such arguments and speculations very valuable and very stimulating—they made him want to think things out for himself. Ross suddenly thought of something, however—Lutchman was a government servant. He wrote to Manson, warning him not to repeat this fact to anyone, since it might well be that to give a civil servant a fever (which his experiment with Lutchman had certainly done) was a crime!

By July Ross was sure that, in general, he was on the right lines. “The first step,” he wrote to Manson, “is completely proved. I have tried four cases with identical results.” “The first step” was the proof that it was from mosquitoes that the malarial infection reached human beings. That may not, nowadays, seem to be very much; but to reach certainty on the point as a result of only two or three months’ work was really very good indeed. It was something that pleased Ross enormously, and also pleased Manson, who had been watching everything from a distance and rubbing his hands with glee as he read successive letters from Secunderabad.

Soon specimens began to arrive with the letters— mosquitoes with various parasites inside them, odd objects found in the blood of patients, and so on. Many of the specimens were, of course, more or less useless by the time they reached London; but some got through unharmed, Manson examined them in his laboratory, and then further long discussions on paper took place.

Now there came an interruption. Secunderabad had been an ideal place for this extensive research on malaria; there were many cases to be kept under observation—and Ronald Ross felt, in a fairly short time, that he was getting within sight of a complete solution of the puzzle that had bewildered doctors for so long.

However, he held a Diploma in Public Health; and, strangely enough (for they usually tended to ignore such things), the authorities appeared to be aware of the fact that he had secured this diploma. In August, 1895, an epidemic of the dread disease of cholera seemed to be about to start in Ross’s old territory of Bangalore; it was thought that, while the civilian hospitals were receiving and dealing with a number of cholera cases, the authorities were not taking sufficient measures to cope with the epidemic which might suddenly assume gigantic proportions. The Resident of Bangalore, Mr. Lee Warner, agreed that the local authorities were not being sufficiently impressed with the urgency of the matter, and since he had heard of Ronald Ross’s intelligence and drive, he asked the Government for Ross’s services. He was required, first of all, to deal with the immediate emergency—the danger of a really serious outbreak of cholera—and, secondly, to examine the general sanitary conditions of Bangalore, to report to the Resident as to what could be improved. He was, in effect, given complete charge of all health measures in the place.

It was an interesting job; but it meant, at any rate in the early stages, a complete stop to all his malaria work. Ronald Ross found it irritating to have to stop when he thought he was in sight of his goal—but he felt sure that he would come back to it some day soon.

CHAPTER TEN

MORE DISCOVERIES

IT WAS ON September 9, 1895, that Dr. Ross arrived in Bangalore; he had, so he said, closed the malaria investigation, since something more urgent had now offered. He was given complete power in Bangalore to do more or less whatever he thought fit. He was told that his task was “to direct and enforce the sanitary operations conducted by the municipality in consultation with the Residency Surgeon,” which, in effect, meant that if there was anything happening which he thought might be bad for public health, he could stop it at once, more or less by order. There had been twenty deaths from cholera in the town in August, before his arrival; in September, before the measures he proposed had got time to take effect, the number of cases had risen to sixty-four; in October the number fell to seven, and the epidemic had been conquered, almost before it had time to start.

Dr. Ross now turned to the general cleaning-up of the city. This took him almost eighteen months; it involved a revision of all sorts of things, especially those dealing with cleanliness and the destruction of the refuse which then (as now) comes from the people of any large town. Ross ventured beyond these measures, which were obviously part of the task of any sanitary officer worth his salt—he advocated the establishment of a municipal laboratory, where food and drink could be analysed, the registration of all dealers in food and milk, and many other improvements of this kind. There was, of course, a good deal of opposition from those who thought that this was making a lot of fuss about nothing; but most of the things that he wanted done were done.

His report to the Resident took over a hundred pages of print; and when he wrote his Memoirs nearly thirty years later, Ross was able to record proudly that his report was still in use as a guide to the cleanliness and good sanitation of the municipality.

An engineer was developing a piped water supply; and Ross suggested that this should be combined with a new system of drains—much of the waste was pouring along the open gutters of the native part of the city. He even worked out the pattern of the drains, and described them in a special report to the Municipality, which published it soon afterwards.

His new type of drain was tried out in a native slum—a horrible area of Bangalore called South Blackpully. The whole area soon improved, and the householders in that area found that, when the drains were down, and a good water supply available, they were somehow impelled to mend holes in walls, repair broken doors, cement the floors of yards, and so on.

There were still occasional local epidemics of cholera. The cause was known; it had been discovered long before by the great bacteriologist, Robert Koch; but, not for the first time, Ronald Ross came to realize that there were occasions when the authorities did not want to follow up Koch’s ideas.

Eventually, however, so effective was Dr. Ross’s work on the epidemic of 1895, that it became plain to the authorities that he knew what he was doing. There were epidemics in 1896 again; but now it was clear enough that cholera was carried in infected wells, and that these wells could be disinfected by the use of the right kind of substances.

Ross by this time had got used to his new job and his new surroundings. For nearly a year he had almost forgotten his malaria investigation, though he had continued to write to Manson. No longer, however, were his letters full of descriptions of experimental work on mosquitoes and malaria. They now dealt with wells and drains and problems of cleanliness and sanitation. He wandered to various other parts of India, too, to see what was being done there—to Poona and to Bombay.

On rare occasions, he allowed his thoughts to go back to his work on malaria. Even in the midst of his heaviest work, he went to the civil hospital in Bangalore and searched for malaria cases there. He regretted that he had not got more time to spare, because he still thought that this work on malaria was the most important that he could do. Yet it was while in Bangalore that he first began testing out an idea that was eventually to be very fruitful indeed.

Manson had thought (as was seen in the previous chapter) that people probably caught malaria by swallowing water in which infected mosquitoes had died. At first this seemed to be quite a sensible idea; but Dr. Ross was now coming around to the belief that nothing of this kind happened. He was beginning to think that mosquitoes had the disease, and that they probably gave it to human beings by biting them.

Then he had a special opportunity of studying this. In Bangalore there was a large civil hospital, called the Bowring Hospital, which Ross had many times visited, in search of malaria cases. In September, 1896, the medical officer in charge of this hospital, Dr. Dobson, left for home, and Dr. Ross was put in charge.

Most of his sanitary work was now proceeding smoothly, and he could safely leave the bulk of it to his assistants; he therefore thought that now he had a real chance of studying malaria again. He at once set about discovering how many malaria patients he had under his care, and of the way in which they could be classified. He took specimens of their blood and examined it for parasites of various kinds—spheres, crescents, flagella, and others.

Then he set about breeding mosquitoes of various sorts —both the grey and the brindled kind—and fed them on the blood of various patients whose blood-samples he had already examined. They were then kept for a day or two, and allowed to bite uninfected people.

There was, at first, some difficulty in finding volunteers for this, as they would be risking infection; after all, the volunteers would be running the risk of a serious illness. Then Mr. Appia, Assistant Surgeon at the hospital, said that he was pleased to offer himself as a “guinea-pig”. Mr. Appia had suffered from malaria some years before; but he had not had an attack for some considerable time, and so he thought he would be a fairly good test case.

The infected mosquitoes which had been kept for a day or two were therefore allowed to bite Mr. Appia. Ross was very reluctant to do this experiment, but if there was ever to be any certainty about the matter, someone had to take part in it. However, even after numerous bites, Appia remained quite free of the fever. He was then bitten by five mosquitoes which had just been feeding on the blood of a patient in whose bloodstream there were huge numbers of the crescent-shaped malaria parasites; again there was no result, in the way of fever infection.

Ross was puzzled, and wrote to Manson about this series of experiments. “Interesting though negative,” Manson said. He added : “It may be that the mosquito conveys the parasite by biting, but I do not think so—at all events, I do not think it does so directly.” Manson suggested that normally the mosquito bit a person and sucked his blood ; then, being satisfied, it would not bite again for some time. He therefore considered that there was some sort of change in the parasite which took a good while to take place. He thought that it was more likely that the original mosquito did not carry the parasite from one person to another, but that the children of the mosquito carried the germ to human beings. He even suggested that a mosquito should be allowed to bite a malaria patient, that its eggs should be hatched, and that it should be seen if the next generation of mosquitoes were able to infect human beings.

Dr. Ross, while he found all this sort of thing interesting as a theory, did not feel that it was likely to be of much value; he did not do any work on these lines, and he said afterwards that he was glad he had not wasted his time on any such work. It would, as things turned out, have been following a false trail—though it is difficult to see why, at the time, Ronald Ross thought so, unless he had a kind of instinct for the best line of attack in this sort of research.

He knew, too, that he had to have a certain amount of relaxation. In doing his work to improve the sanitation of Bangalore, in running the Civil Hospital, in doing all the work on mosquitoes and malaria which was still occupying almost all his thoughts, he still allowed himself time for an occasional game of golf or tennis, he still went to the club to play cards and gossip with his friends; he managed to get his wife and family out to India again, which meant that he was no longer so lonely and isolated as he had sometimes felt in his off-duty hours.

He worked himself as hard as any man possibly could; whenever he heard of any experiments on malaria going on anywhere in the world, he tried to repeat them, to prove that other scientists and medical men were either right or wrong.

In the matter of the flagella, those queer arm-like things that pushed out of the parasites at certain times, he was especially interested. An Italian doctor, called Bignami, for instance, had suggested that the flagella might not be developing things, but might be dying things—their shaking about being their last movements before they died.

Ross thought that this was nonsense; he thought that the flagella were arms which enabled two parasites in some way to combine, or which enabled one of the parasites to develop in some manner. He was as yet by no means sure how the whole thing was going to work out—he was feeling his way still; but the clues were there, he knew. The task which lay immediately ahead was to interpret them, to find out what they meant and the way in which they pointed.

Manson had posted out a copy of Bignami’s article in an Italian medical magazine to Ross, who was at once able to disprove this idea that the movements of the flagella were a kind of dying struggle. He did this by putting a small lump of vaseline on the finger or thumb of a patient, pricking a vein through the vaseline, so that the blood came out into the mass of vaseline. The blood was then never exposed to the air at all. He put the vaseline, with the drop of blood inside it, on to a microscope slide which was at once examined carefully.

He found that the little crescent-shaped things in the blood of a malarial patient never changed into spheres at all, and no flagella were produced, but that the crescents themselves, deprived of air or of fresh blood (in which there is some oxygen from the air), broke up or died in a matter of a few hours. This, he said, meant that there was no need to assume that the flagella were part of any kind of death-struggle.

Scientists often find, however, that some false line of argument, which they are trying to show up, may lead to something true. It was so in this case.

Ross asked himself why it was that the crescents did not develop into spheres when the blood-drop was surrounded by vaseline. Was it, as he had first thought, because they were deprived of air or oxygen; or was it because the vaseline sealed the blood in, so that there could be no evaporation of water? If a drop of blood is exposed to the air, a lot of the water contained in the blood will quickly evaporate; it might well be that, when the blood was in the tiny stomach of a mosquito, water would be absorbed through the wall of the stomach.

Manson did experiments in London with other bloodsucking insects, and was soon able to tell Ross that this idea of water-abstraction was, indeed, the correct explanation of what was happening. Here was another fact established.

He also found that some of the crescents turned into spheres or emitted the flagella; about two-fifths of them, however, seemed to remain as crescents, the flagella never appearing at all. For a long time this puzzled him; he thought that there was something which prevented some of the crescents developing. Then the explanation came suddenly, like a flash of lightning—the cells with the flagella were male cells—the “fathers” of the new malaria parasites—and those without flagella were female cells—the “mothers” of the new malaria parasites. One day in 1897 he saw in a blood specimen which he was examining under the microscope one of the round cells, very still, with flagella moving into it. Even then he did not feel certain what was happening, for he was not quite sure if the flagella were entering into the round cell or whether they were struggling to get out.

He was also experimenting with birds, seeing if it were possible to infect pigeons and parrots with the disease; it had been suggested by some people that this might be at any rate one way in which malaria spread so dangerously in some districts.

Ross’s work in the Civilian Hospital had provided him with a good deal of his material for this study of malaria. It had, indeed, been a great opportunity for him to be put in charge of this hospital as well as having military charge of the station; but Dr. Dobson was still officially in charge of the Civil Hospital, and, if he so wished, was allowed to come back. In March 1897 he decided to do so, which meant that Dr. Ross lost his position in the civil organization of the town.

He had now seen the general sanitary arrangements—water-supply, drainage, and so on—which he had suggested put into operation and working smoothly. There was no real reason why he should not try to get transferred to some other place.

His wife and family were established, high up in the hills, in a pretty bungalow in a place called Ootacamund; he went and had a pleasant little holiday with them, while he was deciding what to do next—or at least what he should try to persuade the authorities to allow him to do.

Once again it should be remembered that all this work on mosquitoes and malaria was a private affair of his own—it was not part of his official duty. He was not paid for doing it; indeed, he was often out of pocket as a result of it, if only in that he found he often had to give money to the men he was examining.

He was wondering, about this time, if he had really got hold of the best insects for his work. He had the two types of mosquitoes, which he called “plain” or “grey” and “brindled”. Yet at Bangalore he had found that, though these mosquitoes were plentiful, there was nothing like as much malaria as in some other places. He therefore asked the Government if he could be sent to some district where malaria was very common—preferably some village in the foothills where there was a lot of malaria, or some place very near the dense jungles still existing in some parts of India, because jungle territory was notoriously that where most mosquitoes and all kinds of insects were found.

It was in some ways typical of Dr. Ross that he did not think of his own safety in these things; it might well have been that, in seeking to be sent to some extremely unhealthy district, he might be risking some very unpleasant or even fatal disease himself, but it appears that such a risk never occurred to him—or, if it did occur to him, that he thought it to be a risk that was well worth taking.

He wrote an article for an Indian paper, stressing the need for a proper investigation of the malaria problem; this, he hoped, would help to ginger up the Government to doing something about it.

While he was at Ootacamund with his family he went off many times into the jungle, trying to catch specimens of mosquitoes. One day he had a very unpleasant experience himself. He took with him some native servants. They had some tea, made in the jungle. Ross noticed that the tea was not as warm as it might have been, and thought that the milk had had water added to it.

He looked at the place from which their drinking water (from which the tea had been made) was drawn. It was a muddy-looking puddle, into which a small mountain stream was trickling. There were water-beetles and frogs in the puddle. The water did not look at all fit for drinking; but Ross and his servants had already drunk water from it.

In a day or two, still wandering through the jungle, he himself got the fever. His bones ached; he knew that he had a high temperature, though he had not taken a thermometer with him. Whether or not the fever came from drinking that water he was not sure; but he used his own case to work out some theory of how long the incubation period was, before the fever got control. He also worked out a highly complicated mathematical calculation of how many of the malaria parasites there must have been in his body. He came to the conclusion, as a result of the number of malaria germs in his body, that he must have breathed in about sixty germs with every cubic inch of air, if that was the way germs entered. On the other hand, if the infection came from the tea made from muddy water, he was again able to work out roughly how many germs there were in each pint of water. Here, too, the figure would be very high.

Quinine soon cured the attack; but it had been a nasty business while it lasted—and it gave Ross a new encouragement to get on with the research.

It had been on April 22, 1897, that he had drunk the tea; on April 27 he got home, feeling wretched, even though the malaria parasites were now almost all destroyed, thanks to the quinine. He took samples of his own blood pretty often, and examined them under the microscope; as late as April 29 (a week after the attack) he still found some parasites in his own blood. He took quinine every day for months after this; but he was weak and very depressed in his mind for quite a long time.

Officially, at this time, Dr. Ross was on leave; but he still spent time and money in studying mosquitoes. He offered a reward to anyone who could bring him mosquitoes, dead or alive; and one native showed him a district in the jungle where they were thick.

All too soon his leave was up. Now he was ordered to report to Secunderabad, where his regiment was stationed. He had not been able to persuade the Government to send him to some malarious village, as he had hoped. He was under military discipline, and had to do as he was told; so he left his family at Ootacamund, the children suffering from whooping cough!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE FINAL DISCOVERY

LIFE AT Secunderabad was pleasant enough; there was always the club for the evenings, and Ross now got a bicycle, which took the place of the ponies he had previously possessed. He started playing cricket again; but it was unbearably hot at times, and there were blinding dust-storms which could be very trying to endure.

Then, one day in June, there came what could have been a disaster. Dr. Ross had stamped out cholera in Bangalore; but he did not expect to find it at a military station. One evening, in the officers’ mess, there was a dinner, to which a number of guests had been invited. Among the food was an ice-cream pudding which everyone said was delicious, and all those present ate a good deal of it. The ice-cream, it seemed, had in some way been infected with cholera, and almost all of those present at the dinner caught this dangerous disease—Ross himself being the most seriously ill of them all.

He cured himself by a very simple course of treatment. He drank cup after cup of very hot tea, without sugar or milk. A kettle had to be kept boiling all the time, with pots of tea continuously provided. Ross had decided that, since cholera affected the water-content of the blood, it was necessary to keep the amount of fluid in his body as high as possible. In a few days he felt better, though he had had a very high temperature, and another doctor who was present at the station had been very worried about him.

He was now back in the old military routine. “There was next to no official work to do in the regiment,” he wrote sarcastically afterwards, “and so a junior Indian officer, named Dr. Kanga, was appointed to help me to do it.”

His mosquito work was therefore resumed, with plenty of time to spend on it; but the weather was so trying that for a good while he could not bring himself to settle down. He scarcely looked at a microscope for a month after arriving at Secunderabad. The Great Monsoon (that cooling wind which normally blew at this time of the year) seemed to have failed; instead there was a hot wind, which, in June, was followed by an absolute calm, when the sky was filled with a haze of dust and the sun hardly got through.

Ronald Ross was now writing verses again—verses which described the kind of weather he was enduring.

“ The sky is red as blood, The very rocks decay,”

he wrote in one poem, but all the same, when he thought of his malaria researches, he felt sure that he was within sight of complete triumph. He told himself that there was need for one more supreme effort, and then the problem would be solved.

He had now got very near to a solution. He was sure that part of his theory (which was to some extent based on the theories of Manson) was true. The change from the crescent to the sphere type of parasite, and the emission of the flagella—that was a change that normally took place inside the mosquito. There was little doubt about the truth of that, since the blood of human beings who had been infected by malaria contained only crescents, whereas, when that blood had been inside the stomach of a mosquito for only a very short time, the crescents turned to spheres.

But how did the crescents change ? What did the flagella mean? And how did all this lead to the production in the blood of human beings of a new generation of parasites which would infect the red corpuscles? Those were the remaining problems—and as yet Ross had not seen his way through them to a solution of any kind.

Manson had made one serious mistake in studying the flagella. He had thought that the flagella break off from the crescents, that they live in air or in water, and that, from this, they enter and infect the patient.

Ross decided that this part of the theory might be wrong. He had not yet finally concluded that the flagella had anything to do with what might be called mosquito parenthood; he remembered that he had seen one of them either entering or leaving one of the spheres, but that flash of inspiration when he had thought that there might be two kinds of cells—male and female—had remained a flash and had not really become part of his thinking about the question as yet.

He made up his mind, therefore, to push on with the routine job—to see as many mosquitoes as he could, of as many species as possible, and then to examine all those which had bitten malarial patients and see what sort of parasites (if any) were in the insects.

He had already found the grey mosquitoes and the brindled variety; but he had found occasional specimens of another type, which he called the dapple-winged mosquito. These had spotted wings and they mostly bit human beings at night. Their grubs floated on the surface of water at night, since they had no breathing-tubes, which enable some grubs to float with their head under the surface of the water.

The grey mosquitoes, he thought, were not very different from the common English gnats; but the dapple-winged type, which might well be the most dangerous type, was something completely different.

One of Ronald Ross’s greatest problems, in fact, was that the word “mosquito” had, before his time, been applied to a number of very different insects, and part of his task was to sort these out.

The main question, however, that he now had to settle was to see if mosquitoes that had been fed on the blood of patients suffering from malaria contained any special kinds of parasites, which mosquitoes fed on the blood of healthy people did not contain.

The work went on, in spite of the weather. There were some tiny little flies, which the Indians called “eye-flies”, and which seemed to try all the time to get under human eye-lids; the screws of the microscope became rusted by sweat from hands and forehead; but still he had to go on.

Now he was lucky enough to get some more specimens of the dapple-winged mosquitoes. One of his servants caught a dozen of them. These were the first that he had found in Secunderabad; and at once he set them to work, trying to get them to bite a patient, Husein Khan, who had already been proved to have large numbers of crescent-shaped parasites in his blood. The man was paid one anna for each mosquito that he allowed to bite him and suck his blood. The mosquitoes, when once they had filled themselves with blood, were put each one in a separate test-tube, with a drop of water to drink at the bottom and a plug of cotton-wool at the top to prevent the insect escaping.

Ross found the usual crescent-sphere change taking place; it did not seem, in spite of his excitement at finding larger numbers of these dapple-winged insects, that he was getting any nearer the final solution of the problem.

This was in the month of August 1897; it was during that month that these dapple-winged mosquitoes appeared in considerable numbers. Some of them died in their test-tubes; the living ones were dissected, one by one, and the contents of their stomachs examined under Ross’s sweat-rusted microscope. He was rather disheartened after two or three days of working with the new species, since the results that he was getting did not seem to be any better than those which he had obtained with the more ordinary mosquitoes he had been examining for years.

Then there dawned the great day. It was August 20, 1897, which he always called “Mosquito Day”, and which, in after years, he was to celebrate as perhaps the most important anniversary of his life. It was a dull day, cloudy and hot. He had a hasty breakfast and went to the military hospital at seven o’clock in the morning.

So far everything seemed to be normal; there was nothing to mark off this day in any special way; it was just another routine day like so many others. Ross examined his patients; they were all doing normally. He went to his office, opened the letters that had come—the usual official correspondence. He felt annoyed because the men who had been out looking for dapple-winged mosquitoes had not brought in any more.

Then he went to look at the specimens of mosquitoes that remained from the batch previously found. To begin with there was nothing special about them—the ordinary crescent-sphere change was taking place in some, in others it was complete.

At about one o’clock he was feeling tired. It can be very tiring to peer through a microscope for a long period of time; and his eyes were beginning to ache with the effort, as with the trouble over the eye-flies, which he had been brushing away and killing at intervals during the morning.

Then he remembered that there were one or two living mosquitoes left; they were the last of those which had been fed four days before on the malarial blood of Husein Khan. He decided that he might as well sacrifice them and finish off this particular task of research.

He went carefully over the tissue of one mosquito’s stomach, dissecting it with his delicate instruments, under the microscope. At first there seemed to be nothing at all unusual.

By this time Ross had got accustomed to disappointment; he must have dissected and studied the stomachs of a thousand mosquitoes in the course of his long task of the years, and he did not expect to find anything startling.

Then, quite suddenly, he saw something that pulled him up with a jerk. In the stomach of the mosquito was a perfect circular body. Its outline was sharp and clear; it was too small to be one of the cells out of which the stomach of the insect was made.

The afternoon was hot and cloudy; the atmosphere was steamy. Ross opened the diaphragm of the microscope which controlled the amount of light that could reach the object being studied; then he slightly changed the focus of the lens. Now something more surprising still could be seen. There were a number of these circles, and in each of them was a cluster of small granules, black in colour, and exactly like the black granules that had previously been seen only in the crescents—the so-called plasmodium.

There were twelve or more of these dark granules in each of the circles.

Ross jumped to his feet; he realized that this was something quite new. The coloured granules had been known as part of the malaria parasite which attacked the red corpuscles of human blood; they had, indeed, been part of the red substance of the blood, changed by some chemical means inside the parasite. That they should exist in the stomach of a mosquito was an exciting discovery, for it meant that here was a connexion between the parasite as known in the human body and as known in the body of the insect.

He called his assistant, who was resting; then he showed it to him and asked him to look through the lens of the microscope and confirm that what Ross had seen was really there. Ross even doubted the evidence, as his own eyes provided it. He wondered if it was that his eyes were tired, and he had imagined something; but his assistant, as soon as he had glanced through the eyepiece of the microscope, indeed confirmed that this was true enough.

There were, in the stomach of that mosquito, small circular cells, each containing twelve to sixteen little black granules, identical with the granules that the crescent-parasite abstracted from the blood of human beings suffering from malaria.

Ronald Ross went to bed that night a very happy man; he had found the link in the chain of evidence, the link which would tie together the whole story of the mosquito. The crescents, he soon realized, were the mother cells; the flagella were the father-cells; when the two joined together, they produced new circular cells. The pigmented granules were present, because they came from the blood of the original patient. The new cells were genuinely new—they were a fresh generation of parasites, containing some part of the blood of the previous generation. Scientifically, they were called zygotes.

Before he went to bed, he sat down and wrote to his wife, still living at their holiday bungalow. “I have seen something very suspicious in my mosquitoes today,” he said, “and hope it may lead to something.” Ross was never a man to jump to conclusions, or to expect too much from some work that he was doing; therefore his statement was about as cautious as it well could be.

As he sealed up the letter, however, another idea came to his mind. If these round cells with the coloured granules were really (as he was sure they were) the parasites, growing in the stomach of the mosquito, they should indeed grow, if they were allowed to stay there for another day, they should be bigger. And there was one mosquito left of the batch that had been fed on the blood of Husein Khan on August 16!

Ronald Ross tried to sleep; but it was not easy. He was possessed by the enthusiasm of a man on the verge of a great discovery. He was also worried by one thing—that mosquito might die in the night, in which case he would have to begin all over again. Though he now knew what it was that he was looking for, it might be a long process. The whole business of working out the life-history of the malaria parasite had been a very long affair and he did not want to have to start it afresh.

The next morning seemed to be a very long time coming. He got up at dawn; then he examined the one remaining mosquito, and was intensely relieved to see that it was still alive. With a very shaky hand he killed it and began the dissection. His skill in dissecting tiny insects under the microscope was considerable; but so much depended on this particular experiment that he felt very nervous indeed about it.

He need not have worried. There were twenty-one of the circular cells in this last mosquito, each of them with the batch of little black granules in them—and (which was what mattered most) they were much bigger than those which he had found on the previous day. The first mosquito had been killed four days after feeding, the second on the fifth day—and the cells had grown a good deal bigger during that fifth day. They were therefore quite certainly parasites; they were the parasites of malaria, growing in the stomach tissues of the mosquito.

“The thing was really done,” Ross wrote in his Memoirs, when he described those exciting days. “All the work on the subject which has been done by me and others during the last twenty-five years has been mere child’s play which anyone could do after the clue was once obtained.”

This book does not include much of Ronald Ross’s actual verse; but there is one little poem which must be included, since it is the most famous poem he ever wrote—-it is, moreover, the only poem which has ever been published, which gives a scientist’s own view of his greatest discovery. It was sent to his wife, in a letter in which he described the piece of work that has been outlined in the last few pages:

This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing; and God

Be praised. At His command,

Seeking his secret deeds,

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save.

O Death, where is thy sting?

Thy victory, O Grave ?

Yet it was only a “clue”, as Ross himself termed it. There was much still to be done before the whole story was complete. He wrote to Manson and told him what he had found. The problem was now much simpler.

One thing, of course, had to be settled. He had shown that there were zygotes in the lining of the mosquito’s stomach, four and five days after it had fed off the blood of the malarial patient; but what happened next? Did they go on growing? And did these mosquitoes infect men, or birds, or each other ? If so, how ? It is clear that there were still plenty of questions to be asked—and answered. The answers were not very long in coming.

One experiment was to give his mosquitoes a second feed, to try to keep them alive for a longer time than five days. He thought that the zygotes, with their coloured granules, would probably break up, on the seventh or eighth day, producing spores—and these spores would then be the means by which human beings were infected.

For a long time he could not find enough of the dapplewinged mosquitoes to go on with the research; then he joined his wife and family at Bangalore for a short leave. He spent his leave in writing a paper on the discovery. It was called “On Some Peculiar Pigmented Cells found in Two Mosquitoes Fed on Malarial Blood”; he posted it off speedily to the British Medical Journal in London, and it was published in the pages of that journal on December 18, 1897—about four months after he had made the original discovery.

Now that the first great discovery had been made, it was not long before it was extended; different types of mosquitoes were studied, and, before long, the zygotes were found in their stomachs. Ross thought it would now be only a matter of another week or two before he would have the whole picture complete, with a description of the way in which the infection was spread.

Then the blow fell; he was ordered to take up an active post, looking after the routine health of soldiers. He could not argue; he had to obey orders; but this was one of the greatest disappointments of his life, as he had thought himself to be within a week or two of the complete life history of the mosquito and of the malarial parasite within it.

The problem for the authorities was that there had been trouble with a rebellious Indian tribe; a campaign had started against some Afridis on the frontier, and Ross was therefore ordered to report to Bombay for military duty. His work on malaria was therefore dropped for the time; but the glory of the original discovery was still his. That paper in the British Medical Journal still remains the first statement of a discovery which was to affect the health and welfare of millions of white people living in tropical countries.

CHAPTER TWELVE

TRIUMPH !

FOR THE NEXT two or three years Dr. Ross was to know all sorts of disappointments and all sorts of interruptions. He now had no doubt that the most important job he could do was to produce the final proof that his discovery was true—the final satisfaction, for all the scientific and medical world, of his claim that he understood the connexion between malaria and mosquitoes.

For Ronald Ross himself, as for Manson in London, it was now quite sure that there was a change inside the stomach of the mosquito, by which two kinds of cells (which might be called “male” and “female”) combined and eventually grew into a new sort of spore. This sort of spore did not need to combine in order to reproduce; when it got into the blood of a human being it could split, thus infecting more and more of the red corpuscles of the blood.

The explanation was convincing to those who shared most of Ross’s ideas—but, as has been seen in the previous chapter, there were still questions that needed answering, and it was really infuriating that he should be called away to do ordinary routine work at the very moment when he was on the point of getting the full story.

What was worse, when he got to a small military station called Kherwara, not far from Bombay, he found that there was no crisis; there were no seriously wounded men; the local medical officer had gone home on sick leave, and someone had sent Ross to take his place. When he told one of the officers that at least this would give him a chance to go on with his work on malaria, he was laughed at. There was no malaria in Kherwara; there had not been a case of the disease in the local hospital for a couple of months past.

He began to wonder if he was being made the victim of some high official, who objected to his spending his spare time in studying malaria; but it did not seem that this was so.

All the same, he was getting very annoyed at the way things were going. He almost decided, in 1898, to leave the Indian Medical Service; he had applied for a month’s leave, to go and look after his family, and then to Calcutta, to see the Government about his malaria work, and this application was refused. He felt like a prisoner at Kherwara, although it was a pretty place, set among hills, down which little mountain streams trickled.

Meanwhile he tried to get back to malaria. Manson had been appointed Medical Adviser to the Colonial Office in London, and Ross wrote to urge him to try to get the Indian Government to take up the malaria question. Manson told him that he had persuaded the Secretary of State for India to write to the Viceroy (who was Queen Victoria’s direct representative in India), asking for Ross to be taken off routine medical duties, and put, full-time, on the study of malaria.

Out there at Kherwara, in Rajputana State, Ross heard of this with relief, though he felt that it would be a slow process, getting the authorities to agree to anything of the sort. He was not able to do anything in the way of practical research, but he had to content himself with thinking about the problem and writing long letters to Manson.

He enjoyed some fishing in the little streams of Rajputana; but most of his other spare-time occupations had been dropped in the busy task of research. He still wrote some verses; they were for the most part complaining and bitter statements of how he felt the unfairness of being taken away from what he knew was valuable and important work.

“What a lot I scribble to you,” he wrote at the end of one of his letters to Manson at this time. “Absolutely nothing else to do.”

Early in 1898, however, he was at last told to go on special duty—which presumably meant the study of malaria. This appointment, under the Director-General of the Indian Medical Service, was, he was told, to last for six months. Ross thought that it would be long enough to enable him to get a complete and satisfactory proof of his theories about malaria, and on February 8, 1898, he received his orders to leave Kherwara, which he did with the greatest joy. It was a pleasant place, but he had thought of his time there as being time that was absolutely wasted.

He was in Calcutta very soon, where he was to work. He found, on arrival, that he had a pretty tall order—he had to investigate malaria, which he had anticipated; but he was also expected to study a disease called kala-azar—and he had been given six months to do the two jobs. It was a flattering tribute to his ability as a medical researcher; but it was not at all an easy task to do the two jobs simultaneously.

He was also told that if he found a bit more time was needed for the two tasks, he would be allowed to apply for an extension of the six months, though he knew that this was by no means certain.

As soon as he was established in Calcutta he set about working in much the same way as he had done at Secunderabad. He set some of the assistants in the hospital hunting for mosquitoes and grubs so that he would be able to get a good stock of them. He also got his wife and children established, though he knew that they would have to leave again (probably for Darjeeling) as soon as the weather in Calcutta got really hot. He also found that there was no really satisfactory medical library, so he wrote to a medical bookseller in London for certain reference books on parasites, which he knew he would want before long.

He soon got a stock of the dapple-winged mosquitoes, and set about his scheme of getting them to bite patients who were suffering from malaria. He flooded some ground outside the laboratory, in the hope that he would be able to imitate rain-puddles and see if he could prove something about mosquito-breeding.

For the first time for months Ross was now happy. He was doing his real job again, and those dismal days in Kherwara seemed to be part of a nightmare from the past. “ If I am not on the pigmented cells again in a week or two,” he wrote to Manson, “my language will be dreadful.” He realized that it might not be at all easy, since it might well be that special weather conditions were necessary before the flagella could get established in the stomach cells of the mosquito.

He also started on his work of kala-azar. This means “black sickness”. It was a fever, but was not intermittent, like malaria. It came on acutely and suddenly, and it almost always meant death.

He was given a laboratory which consisted of two sizable rooms, offices, and a cool and shady veranda. There were two Indian assistants, who had already been working there when he arrived; but they were old men, and not very intelligent, he thought, so he engaged two younger men, Purboona and Mahomed Bux. Both of those he paid out of his own pocket. He said that he engaged Mahomed Bux because he looked the most rascally of all those who came to apply for work, and he thought that such a scoundrel must be intelligent!

There were not a large number of mosquito cases in the Calcutta hospitals, and so Ross turned to something which he had thought about previously—the study of mosquitoes and malaria, as seen in birds. He caught pigeons, crows, larks and sparrows, setting out cages on two old hospital beds. Mosquito nets were put over the beds, and then, at night, infected mosquitoes were put under the nets. Before much time had passed he found that crows and pigeons had some of the malaria parasites in their blood; also he found the pigmented cells, which he had first spotted in Secunderabad, in the stomachs of mosquitoes which had been fed on infected larks.

He was now writing to Manson almost every day; he was sure of the whole life-history of the mosquito, except that he had not actually seen the zygotes, those spherical cells into which the flagella had penetrated, turning into spores. This was the last stage in the study. He found that the cells depended, as regards their size, exactly on the length of time since the mosquitoes had been fed on infected blood. The parasites, he soon proved, grew to their maximum size about six days after the feed of infected blood had been given. They left the stomach after this time; but what happened to them then? This was the next task he had to set about carrying out. He had taken some months to get to this stage—it was the end of April before he was able to get very much further.

Then, one day, he was studying some sparrows. One was quite healthy, another contained a few of the malaria parasites, the third had a large number. Each bird he put under a separate mosquito net, and exposed to a group of mosquitoes from a batch that had been hatched out from grubs in the same bottle. Now he got a result which seemed likely to lead to a final answer. Fifteen mosquitoes were fed on the healthy sparrow; in their stomachs not one parasite was found. Nineteen mosquitoes were fed on the second sparrow; every one of these contained some parasites, though, in some cases, not very many. Twenty insects were fed on the third, badly infected, sparrow; every one of these contained some parasites in their stomachs, and some contained huge numbers.

This delighted him; he wrote to Manson that it was a beautiful piece of work, and off went a report, at once, to the medical authorities who had set him working in Calcutta. He asked them if he could be excused from the work on kala-azar, since the constant study with the microscope was proving very trying for his eyes; he also begged to be given some qualified medical assistants. Both these requests were refused, and so he had to go on with the double task, more or less on his own.

Manson wrote an article in the British Medical Journal describing the work that Ross had done; the British Medical Association conference was to meet in Edinburgh in July, with a special new section devoted to the study of tropical diseases, with Manson himself as its President. Ross wanted to provide the final story of the malaria parasite for this meeting; but he knew that time was very short. He still did not have the full details of sporulation —that is, the change from the zygotes in the mosquito’s stomach into the spores that could infect human beings and birds.

He found that some of the zygotes seemed to have stripes or ridges in them; this happened on the seventh or eighth day after the mosquito had been fed on infected blood. He spent hours every day peering into his microscope, and he wrote to Manson: “The constant strain on mind and eye at this temperature is making me thoroughly ill.” He sent his wife and children to Darjeeling; but he stayed on in Calcutta, working on at his theories and carrying on with his experiments which became more and more exciting as he felt he was getting nearer and nearer to the complete story.

No doubt these zygotes with the stripes or rods burst—and then what happened to them ? When they burst did they produce the same spores that infected human blood ? This was sure to be the true story; but he had not yet proved it.

Then, on July 4, 1898, he got something of value. Near a mosquito’s head he found what he called “a large branch-looking gland”. It led into the head of the mosquito. “It is a thousand to one,” he wrote, “that it is a salivary gland”—a gland rather like those around the tongue of a human being or an animal.

Did this gland infect healthy creatures? Did it mean that if an infected mosquito fed off the blood of an uninfected human being or bird, then this gland would pour some of the parasites, now in the form of spores, into the blood of the healthy creature? During July 21 and 22 of that year, he took some uninfected sparrows, allowed mosquitoes which had been fed on malarious sparrows to bite them, and then, within a few days, was able to show that the healthy sparrows had become infected. This was the proof, he told himself—this showed that malaria was not conveyed by dust or bad air. After all, men and birds, he said, “don’t go about eating dead mosquitoes.”

On July 25, now that he was sure, he sent off a triumphant telegram to Sir Patrick Manson reporting his complete solution, and three days later Manson spoke at the British Medical Association meeting in Edinburgh, describing the long and painstaking piece of research which Ross had been carrying out for years past.

Medical conferences are not, as a rule, very exciting affairs, they are quiet and sober; but when Manson, towards the end of his address, read Ross’s triumphant telegram, there was quite a sensation at the meeting. It was rather like the sensation that might be expected if a great detective at Scotland Yard announced the arrest of a criminal, at the end of a long and difficult case.

This was to be almost Ross’s last task in India. He was not really (as he would have been the first to admit) an ordinary doctor. All his life he was to be fascinated by the work of medical research, which is something very different from that of the ordinary doctor, who looks after his patients, and prescribes medicines for their ailments and decides which of them are to go to hospital. Ross was a research scientist, who was mainly interested in getting to the very heart of a problem, deciding how a disease is spread and how the spread can be prevented.

He worked on kala-azar, and suggested various ways in which it could be treated; but his heart was not really in this problem. It was malaria that he was interested in, and he knew, now, that there was much to be done to apply his discoveries.

This, too, linked on to what he had done in his sanitary work at Bangalore. He had proved that the dapplewinged mosquitoes, which were mainly responsible for the spread of malaria, do not breed in pots and drains and vases—or not very readily, at any rate. They breed for the most part in pools and puddles of stagnant water on the ground. Therefore, there was an obvious way to prevent the spread of this mosquito, and that was to deal with such pools or puddles, either by drying them up in some way, or by covering the surface of the water with some liquid through which the mosquitoes could not penetrate. It was such a task that sanitary authorities would have to set themselves, and it was on these lines that Ross’s mind began to work after he had seen the triumph of 1898.

He now thought that his usefulness in India was almost completely over. He had been given this special task of studying malaria and kala-azar; and he wrote a long report to the Government, setting out his discoveries and his ideas of what might be done in the future. Within two years or less, he thought, a sanitary service, properly set up and properly organized, could practically stamp out this disease of malaria and so make the tropical countries far safer and far happier for white man and coloured man alike.

“On the morning of August 13,” he wrote, “Mahomed Bux and I released all our poor little feathered prisoners. May their little souls be living for ever among eternal flowers and berries in some avian heaven.”

He was due for leave; and he took his wife and family back to England. He was not sure whether he would go back; after the lengthy duty that he had carried out, he was due for a small pension, but many men did a second spell, after which their pension would be considerably increased. Such a second appointment was by no means automatic, though there can be little doubt that if Ronald Ross had cared to apply, he would have been appointed, for the Indian Medical Service was now very much aware that in Ross they had a genius.

This was not to be. Manson, as Medical Adviser to the Colonial Office, had long felt that there should be set up some schools of tropical medicine in England. The study of tropical diseases, he was convinced, would be really well carried out only if there were centres of study in the home country, where there could be established training schools for medical men who were going out to take up appointments in tropical countries.

He worked out a scheme on these lines ; the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, agreed, and invited various hospitals, especially those with flourishing medical schools, to start courses of lectures on tropical diseases.

The first place where this invitation was taken up was Liverpool, and the famous Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine was started. This happened just at the time that Ross came home on leave; he naturally saw a good deal of Manson—the two men had not met for years, though their letters had kept them in touch. Ross had threatened to have Manson’s letters to him bound up into a huge volume and, indeed, the correspondence of four years between two men who wrote always at great length would have made a good-sized book.

Now conversation, for the time, took the place of letterwriting; Manson told Ross that he had managed to interest the Government in the establishment of schools of tropical medicine in Great Britain. He told him, moreover, of the enthusiasm being felt in Liverpool, where, owing to its importance as a port of call for many ships from all over the world, the hospitals had always had to deal with a considerable number of cases of tropical diseases among sailors.

The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine wanted a lecturer to take charge of the special classes which it was intended soon to start—classes to train doctors who were due to go out to the tropics. The lecturer would have to be a doctor, of course; he would also have to be a man with expert knowledge and tropical experience.

The West African shipping company of Elder, Dempster and Company offered to give £350 a year towards the cost of the school and other subscriptions came in. It was proposed, if suitable people could be found to staff the school, that it should start in the May Term of 1899.

Ross went to Liverpool in April, to see the authorities there; he thought that, since he had his pension from India, he might be able to afford to work in Liverpool for less salary than he would otherwise have been compelled to ask for. In any case, his children were now too old to go back to India; they would have to be sent to school in England, and he knew that the post that would come his way if he went back might not be especially well paid.

He wrote, therefore, to Dr. Rupert Boyce, Professor of Pathology at University College, Liverpool, asking if it would be possible for him to be considered for the lectureship which it was intended to set up. He pointed out that this might mean a considerable financial loss to him, especially since his pension would be far higher if he did a further few years in India. It would also, he thought, be necessary for him to spend a good deal of his time out of England. Ross was not like many scientific researchers, who can remain aloof from their chosen field of study. If he were to continue to study tropical diseases, especially malaria, he would not be content to do this in the comfort of a laboratory in England; he would have to go to the tropics fairly frequently, in order to study the problems on the spot.

The Liverpool authorities knew that they had a most valuable recruit in Ronald Ross. They at once appointed him. The School of Tropical Medicine was, of course, only just about to begin its work; it was on a very insecure financial foundation; but Ross was told that they could guarantee him three years’ work, and that they hoped, as soon as more money had been collected, to make the post a permanency.

In the middle of April 1899 Ross and his family settled in Liverpool. A new part of his life was beginning.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LECTURER AND TRAVELLER

ROSS WAS to stay in Liverpool for nearly thirteen years. They were not, in some ways, such exciting years as those which he had spent in India; they did not yield so many obvious triumphs, or bring him quite so much in the public eye as his earlier years had done.

The work of a scientific researcher, attached to a university, is not so dramatic as is that of a man who is out in the wilds, trying to track down the cause of a deadly disease; but it is in many ways just as valuable. For one thing, Ross was able to train many doctors who went out to tropical countries to apply there what he had taught them at home.

Just as valuable, too, was his work in various tropical lands. He had made it perfectly clear, when he had been appointed to the Liverpool post, that he was to be free to visit such tropical countries as he thought advisable and necessary for the development of his work.

Naturally, it was to West Africa that the authorities in Liverpool looked, since most of the ships for the West African ports sailed from the Mersey. Sierra Leone, which had been called the “White Man’s Grave”, owing to the prevalence there of various tropical diseases (including malaria in its most virulent form) was the first place to attract the attention of the Liverpool school. Ross soon acquired the name of the health missionary; within a few months of his appointment he set off to the coast of West Africa, to see if his Indian discoveries could be applied in that country.

He took with him an assistant from Liverpool, Mr, H. E. Annett, and Mr. E. E. Austen, an insect expert from the British Museum. Freetown, Sierra Leone, was to be his headquarters for a time, and here he at once set out to see how far his discoveries from India could be applied in another country far away.

Ross arrived at Freetown on August io. He found it to be the middle of the rainy season, and the air was hot and steamy; but, after his long Indian experience, he was not very worried by the weather. It was a pleasant town, though most of the natives lived in wooden shanties, with yards or gardens in between. The streets were wide, with badly made gutters, in which weeds grew wildly. There was a piped water supply coming down from the hills behind, with taps in the streets. There was no proper drainage system, and streams from the mountains ran through the town to the sea.

Mosquitoes of various types abounded, including some species which were new to Ross. In a military hospital there were many cases of malaria.

He set about his work in just the same way as he had done in India—capturing mosquitoes, and making sure that they were the cause of the disease. Once this fact had been established (it took only a few days), Ross and his party watched the way in which the creature was breeding, and paid special attention to the kind of place in which it was to be found. Puddles which dried up quickly in the hot sun, or which contained small fish, did not have the grubs. After heavy rain a pool did not contain any of the grubs for about two days.

The worst season for malaria, they were assured by local people, was the season of rain. In the long, dry spells of summer few cases of malaria were to be found. It was clear that stagnant puddles were the real source of infection.

Something new emerged, too. A railway had been recently laid, and it had been found that more malaria cases occurred when the railway embankments were being built. Ross found that there had been pools of water in the making of these embankments; and here, again, mosquitoes had bred.

Before his arrival it had been thought that the malaria parasites had existed in the ground and that the actual digging had released them. This was soon shown to be false.

In the end the party made a complete map of the town, showing all the places where pools could be detected. These pools were the centre of malarial infection. The Governor, impressed by the way in which this had demonstrated the source of malaria, took measures to eliminate the insects by preventing the formation of puddles. Similar measures were soon being carried out in the neighbouring colony of Nigeria. Before he sailed for home Ross thought that he was well on the way to stamping out malaria on the African coast. It did eventually come to pass—but not as soon as he expected.

He was back in Liverpool by the end of November 1899 and spoke at a banquet given in honour of the School of Tropical Medicine. He denounced the fact that the authorities did not seem disposed to take much notice of the explanation now known.

One of the leading Indian Medical Service authorities was in London on leave at this time; he visited Liverpool, called to see Ross, and offered him a permanent post in India. However, Ross was having nothing of this. He had found great difficulty, in his Indian years, in getting time to do his research; moreover, now that he had established himself in Liverpool, with his children at school and his wife living in a pleasant home, he was not disposed to give all this up. It would, too, have been very unfair to the Liverpool authorities had he thrown the post up after only a few months in it.

Ross was now accepted as a great man. He was not merely dependent on Manson for encouragement. He went regularly to London, and on March 2, 1900, he gave a lecture to the Royal Institution on his work. The Duke of Northumberland took the chair; Ronald Ross’s mother and wife were given the seats of honour. Later on he gave a similar lecture at Cambridge; he was a friend of Professor Ray Lankester, who was editor of the Journal of Microscopical Science, and who asked for a series of diagrams, showing the life-history of the malaria parasite. These Ross was delighted to provide.

There were occasional squabbles, too. Ross had a tremendous argument with a group of Italian medical men who had been working on malaria; they claimed that they had made the same discoveries as he, whereas he said that they had known of his work, and had merely repeated it.

In Liverpool, however, he was now looked on as one of the greatest men of the day. He wrote a booklet, instructing students going out to the tropics how to deal with malaria; he lectured to the students and gave a number of lectures to the general public. He also continued to write verses, though he did not try to publish many of them.

His life had become more of a routine; but, unlike the medical routine in India, it was a routine which he enjoyed. In 1901 he went to Sierra Leone again. This time he hired a gang of workmen, gave them pickaxes, shovels, and oil, and decided that, if the Government had dropped their anti-malaria campaign, he would carry out a private campaign of his own.

He told the story of this afterwards in a booklet which was published by the Liverpool University Press.

They set to work, collected all old bottles, tins, and so on, in which stagnant water might be a breeding-ground for mosquitoes. Pools and puddles they drained when they could; when draining was impossible, they put a layer of oil or creosote on the surface of the water, since Ross thought that this would prevent the mosquito from laying its eggs on the pool—or, if the eggs were successfully laid, it would prevent them from hatching out.

The tins and bottles collected were dumped in the sea. A large number of them were examined, and it was found that there were grubs in almost all of them. Nearly every house had been breeding mosquitoes in its own yard or garden!

Ross decided that this would be just a demonstration, showing what could be done by a few determined men, and towards the end of 1901 he read a paper on malaria prevention to the British Association—a paper that was praised by no less a man than the great Lord Lister, then the leading medical authority in Great Britain.

He was now travelling all over the world, always repeating his work, always showing that what had been done in India could be done elsewhere. In 1902, in addition to a final visit to Sierra Leone (where the old state of affairs had come back after his great operation of the year before), he went to Ismailia, midway between Port Said and Suez—the town which had been founded when the Suez Canal was cut. This had a population of 7,000 people, and in the previous year there had been over 2,000 cases of malaria. It had even been suggested that the town would have to be abandoned.

Malaria had been almost unknown there until 1877, when the Suez Canal was being cut. Ross knew that this meant that there was now more fresh water about— mosquitoes did not breed on salt water—and there were no doubt pools and puddles which would form around the canal.

This time he went in response to an official invitation, which came from no less a personage than Prince Auguste d’Arenberg, who was President of the Suez Canal Company.

Once more he found the old story—the medical authorities had not understood the idea that the mosquito grubs grew on stagnant water, and that where there were grubs, there would be malaria. Ross found the grubs in various places—in beds for growing water-cress, in a marsh that oozed out of a slow-flowing part of the canal, and in some pools that had been formed to irrigate some of the land. Under the houses, too, there were drainage pits. There was no piped drainage, but there had been established pits into which the water and other refuse from each house could flow. These were sealed, except for a ventilation pipe. All that was needed, Ross found, was to pour a tumbler-full of oil (which would seal the water surface) down each of these ventilation pipes once a week.

“Victory was complete,” Ross wrote. “The mosquitoes disappeared as if by magic, and next year the French ladies in the town ceased to use mosquito-nets, even for their children.”

He went to Panama to repeat his Suez triumph at the other of the great world canals. He went to Spain, to Greece, to Cyprus. Wherever there was malaria, there at some time or another in those busy years from 1900 to 1910, Ross went.

By that time he did little detailed work with the microscope. That task was done. His job now, as he conceived it, was to use his great fame to make governments everywhere aware of what could be done to stamp out this disease. He had been made Professor and, while he did not worry much about the title, or even about the rise in salary which the higher position brought, he knew that it would be of value in giving him more prestige and in enabling him to make people see that malaria, once the dread of the tropics, was a disease that could be conquered by taking a few quite simple measures.

His many students were now carrying across the world the message which he had taught them. Governments were becoming more ready to carry out the measures which he had suggested. More and more he was being called upon to lecture. “Mosquito Day” (the anniversary of his original discovery) was being celebrated in medical schools all over the world. He was the great man recognized at his true worth. At the age of fifty he was the one real authority in the world on a medical problem that had baffled doctors for generations.

Ross himself did not do the work which stamped out malaria in Malaya in 1909; but Malcolm Watson, who was largely responsible for this measure, was one of Ross’s most eager disciples, and he worked along lines which could never have been thought of had it not been for Ross’s work.

Honours began to pour upon him. In 1902 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine—the greatest international honour that any doctor can have; the Society of Arts (now the Royal Society of Arts) gave him the Albert Medal; Universities gave him honorary degrees— Dublin, Leeds, Aberdeen, Stockholm, Athens. In 1911 King George V made him a Knight Commander of the Bath, and in 1918 (after his work in the First World War, which will be briefly described later) he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

He still wrote poetry; some books of his were published and, though no more novels appeared after Child of Ocean in 1889, he still thought that he might one day turn to writing stories of one sort or another.

He was also given the interesting task of editing a quarterly magazine called Science Progress, which gave details of scientific advances in many fields. It had been originally just a magazine containing articles on science; but Ross enlarged its scope by persuading a series of experts to write, each quarter, an outline of the recent work in their own special field of study. This meant that in addition to having a series of original articles on various topics, the magazine contained, each quarter, a first-rate account of what was going on in all the sciences. Under his editorship the sale of this magazine doubled.

His son, Ronald Campbell Ross, had decided to take up the Army as a career. When war broke out in 1914 the family were on holiday at Bourne End, on the Thames. Ronald Campbell Ross, then a Lieutenant in the Royal Scots, had, of course, at once to report to his regiment. He was reported missing towards the end of 1914, and his father had months of torturing doubt until he heard at last that the boy had been killed on August 26.

This was a terrible blow to his father; but Ross did not allow his personal griefs to prevent him from carrying on with his work. There were battle-fronts in malarial countries, and he at once offered his services to the Government, to be used anywhere where he might be found of value. Like his near-contemporary, Sir Alexander Fleming, Sir Ronald Ross knew that a doctor’s chief task in war is to save life.

He was sent to Egypt, where he remembered his work at Ismailia some years before; then on to Salonika, where he was able to offer sage advice on the way in which to prevent malaria from attacking the troops. He had already been appointed Consulting Physician in Tropical Diseases for the hospitals which had been set up in England for the many Indian troops who came here.

Later he was given a room at the War Office, as a special consultant in malaria. He had resigned his Liverpool post in 1912, and had come to London as a general consultant; so he did not have to carry on with his lectures, which might have been a considerable strain, in addition to all the travelling, in somewhat dangerous circumstances, which he had to do in connexion with his war duties.

More than once he was in danger of being torpedoed; on one occasion, in an Italian harbour, he had the excitement of seeing a ship hunt down and sink a German submarine in a landlocked bay.

Something in that journey to Egypt and Salonika, however, had damaged his health. In 1917 Ross was sixty years of age; and from that date onwards, he said in his Memoirs, his health was not as good as it always had been.

His home life kept him happy. In 1916 his elder daughter Dorothy was married to Lieutenant-Colonel Langstaff of the Royal Army Medical Corps; in 1917 his younger daughter Sylvia was married to Captain Blumer of the Durham Light Infantry. Both these weddings took place at the famous church of St. George’s, Hanover Square; at the second of them Ross had the pleasure of hearing several pieces of music which he had composed nearly forty years before, played by the organist as part of the incidental music of the service.

Towards the end of the First World War he still kept busy, as a consultant in London. Whenever there was any real trouble in connexion with tropical diseases, he was called into the picture. Although he was not in good health, he kept himself at the disposal of the Government.

In 1918 he was made a colonel. He remained at the War Office, attending regularly to his duties there, until the autumn of 1919 when he was officially demobilized. Even then he took on an unpaid post as Honorary Consultant in Malaria to the Ministry of Pensions.

After the end of the war there were a large number (Ross numbered them in thousands) of ex-service men who were suffering from malaria or its after-effects, as a result of their war service. Ross suggested that it would be possible to deal with all these men and their special problems only by setting up a number of special clinics to look after them. A number of doctors (some of them his own old students from Liverpool) took charge of these clinics, and they had a good deal of success in dealing with men who had repeated attacks of malaria, sometimes long after the original infection.

In 1921 he wrote an interesting article, which was published in the British Medical Journal. This was largely based on the experiences of the clinics, and suggested that one large dose of a remedy like quinine could not really deal with all the parasites that had invaded the body of a sick person. He said that the doses might have to be repeated over a fairly long period of time, and went on to work out how it would be possible, by careful examination of the patient, to decide the satisfactory dosage, and the number of times that the dose would have to be repeated. This was his last original contribution to the medical press, though he continued, from time to time, to write for Science Progress.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

OLD AGE

IN THE LIFE of even the most active person, there comes a time when he feels the need to slow up, to take things easier. This time came to Sir Ronald Ross after his experiences in the First World War. He had much more to do, and several years of life before him; but the most active phase of his life was over.

He spent part of his time writing his Memoirs, the most valuable and important source of information as to his life which anyone can have. It has been drawn upon, for many little-known facts, in the present book. It is one of the few books which have ever been written by a first-rate scientific investigator, regarding the work which he had done. The part of that book which describes the long study of malaria is one of the most exciting pieces of writing in all the literature of science.

The book was published in 1923; in 1923, also, there appeared in The Times a letter signed by many people eminent in science and public life. It said that now that Sir Ronald Ross’s work on malaria was recognized as a most important piece of medical research, it was time that some permanent memorial of his work should be established.

As a result there was set up the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases. At first, this was established in a large house and grounds on Putney Heath in South London, which soon became a centre of study and research. Opened in 1926 by the Prince of Wales, this had Ross himself as its Director-in-Chief; but he was now an ailing man of nearly seventy, and the strain of getting this new organization working was a very hard matter for him to bear.

Still, he attended regularly, presided over meetings of the staff at Putney, at which long discussions went on as to future work and prospects. He did a certain amount of lecturing there, supervising the way in which students were learning to apply the principles which he had worked out in the past.

No longer was there the excitement of new discoveries; but still he was insistent on the need for control of the mosquitoes. In every new territory that was developed in the tropics, it would, he insisted, be necessary to find out which kind of mosquito was the most dangerous from the point of view of spreading malaria. Then it would be needful to find out where and how the mosquito bred; then the pools in which it bred had to be drained, or tackled by means of oil-spraying.

Only when all these things had been done would any possibility arise of safe settlement of white people in the district.

Ross was now, however, a very tired old man. Now and then there would come a flash of the old vigour in his eyes; but he had worked himself so hard in his younger days that in his old age there was weakness and feebleness of body. His mind was as alert as ever; but he could no longer force himself, as once he did, to work twelve hours and more a day.

In 1927 his old friend and pupil, Malcolm Watson, who had freed Malaya from the tyranny of the mosquito, came home to take active charge of the Institute. Under his direction (with Ross still presiding at times) it became possible to apply in India and in Africa the successful methods of exterminating the dangerous mosquitoes which he had worked out in Malaya. It was a final triumph for Sir Ronald Ross to know that, even though some of his work had been done by others, they all acknowledged that the inspiration came from him.

Not long before Watson came home—in 1926—Sir Ronald Ross visited him in Malaya. He gave his last public lecture there, in the College of Medicine in Singapore. On the walls of the lecture room hung maps of the malaria-infested regions of the world, and charts showing that tens of thousands of lives had been saved by this new knowledge.

It was a boiling hot afternoon; Ross scorned the weather. For an hour he spoke to that crowded audience, telling them the whole story of malaria, from its first recorded occurrence in the days of Ancient Greece, down to the twentieth century, when he had been able to see the way in which the dread disease had been conquered in the streets of Singapore.

He travelled, with Watson, for some six hundred miles in Malaya. He visited towns and villages, farms and mines, rice fields and native estates. More than once there were tears in the old man’s eyes, as he saw the way in which the anti-malaria work had been carried out.

What gave Sir Ronald most comfort was to meet all sorts of prominent men—planters, business men, doctors, administrators. No longer had they got to be persuaded of the value of mosquito control—they had already seen, with their own eyes, that the Ross principles had value, that the Ross discoveries, properly applied, produced results.

When he got back to London, he spoke to the Committee which was controlling the Institute of what he had seen. He said that the work that had been done in Malaya was “the greatest sanitary achievement ever accomplished in the British Empire.”

Every day, from then on as long as his health would permit, he lunched at the Institute at Putney. Those who attended the lunches still speak of them. Flashes of wit and jollity, glimpses of deep and unexpected knowledge—all these things filled his talk, and chaff and joking in which everyone was expected to join.

Now and then some distinguished visitor would be at the meal; he, too, would be expected to take part in the general atmosphere of happiness and jollity. It was as if Ross, in his old age, knew that he had at last seen justified all the difficulties and problems of his youth. Now he knew that his work on malaria—those long slogging days in the steamy heat of India—had reached fulfilment.

There was, however, one blow which was to be the heaviest he had ever known. He had married his wife in 1889, and they had spent the best part of forty years together. More than once parted for long periods, owing to his work in tropical countries, they had remained true to each other through thick and thin. Everything that he had been doing he had explained in great detail to her in letters when they were apart. And now, in 1931, she died.

From that moment Ross himself seemed to lose strength. After Lady Ross’s death he gave up his home and came to live at the Institute, which was, indeed, all that life now held for him. In 1932 it was clear that he had not long to live, but he was comfortable and was well looked-after by the nursing staff.

On September 15, when he was very weak indeed, he woke up and said, slowly and quietly: “I shall find out things—yes—yes.” In a few minutes he was dead.

He was a great man and he will long be remembered. Not only by his work which has been described in this book—his work in many tropical countries—but by the fact that he was largely responsible for the development of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and by the Ross Institute.

Seven years after his death this great memorial to him took on a new lease of life. London University had long recognized the need for a teaching organization, and the Ross Institute was, in 1933, made into a part of this—it was amalgamated with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Bloomsbury, where the main buildings of the University of London are situated.

Sir Ronald’s old student, colleague, and friend, then Sir Malcolm Watson, was made the Director of the new Department of the University, named the Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene, an appointment that would have delighted Ross himself.

On the front of the building in Keppel Street there are carved portraits of the great immortals in medicine; among them is an excellent portrait of Ross himself. In the Seamen’s Hospital for Tropical Diseases a ward has been named “The Ross Ward”.

Some men are remembered for the fact that they have done great evil in the world, some for the fact that they have occupied positions of great power.

Sir Ronald Ross will always be remembered for the good he did, for the fact that, even though the rich and the powerful people in the world did not believe that he was ever going to do any good, he went on in the face of great difficulties and won through.

Wherever there is malaria in the world, wherever the mosquitoes hum their high-pitched hum in the night— Ross will not be forgotten; and as long as men suffer from the diseases which were once thought to be incurable his work will not be complete.

In Malaya, in Africa, in India, in China, in Japan—in all those places, no matter what governments are in power, no matter what men may feel about pensions and housing and war and peace—Sir Ronald Ross will be remembered gratefully, not because of his strength or his money or his power, but because he showed men how to conquer a killing disease.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save.

O Death, where is thy sting?

Thy victory, O Grave?

He wrote that in 1897. It will still be remembered in 1997 and long afterwards.

FURTHER READING

It is not easy to get hold of any of the books by or about Sir Ronald Ross, because they are out of print; but the list that follows will suggest that there are several books about him which are well worth reading. The most important, of course, is his own Memoirs, which gives far more detail of his great discoveries than is available in any other volume, and has been drawn on in writing this book.

J. O. Dobson, Ronald Ross, Dragon Slayer, S.C.M. Press, 1934-

R. L. Megroz, Ronald Ross, Discoverer and Creator, Allen and Unwin, 1931.

Ronald Ross, Memoirs, John Murray, 1923.

Malcolm Watson, Ronald Ross, Pamphlet, published by Science Progress, 1933.

The author wishes to express his gratitude to the librarians of the Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene and the Royal Society of Arts, for their assistance in procuring books and providing information, though it should be quite clear that the story of Sir Ronald Ross as told in the present book is, in its interpretation and its outlook, purely the responsibility of its author.

Additional Information

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1902/ross/biographical/

https://web.archive.org/web/20140221235135/http://www.evolve360.co.uk/Data/10/Docs/20/Lavery.pdf

https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/4/118526/Nobel-Prize-celebrates-Ronald-Ross-125-years-since-discovery-of

https://www.lstmed.ac.uk/lstms-125th-anniversary/lstm-innovators/sir-ronald-ross-kcb-kcmg-frs-frcs

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/library-archive-open-research-services/archives/sir-ronald-ross-collections