Although millions of lives have been saved because of the discovery sected under the microscope represented at least two hours of concentrated Sir Ronald Ross made on August 20, 1897, not the least important aspect of the anniversary lies in the fact that owing to so-called "economy", sometimes to mere prejudice, and eyen to dull indifference, it remains true that, as he complained not long before his death in 1932, less than a tenth of the necessary hygienic measures against malaria have been carried out by the responsible authorities, Ross was a: Surgeon In the Indian Medical Service, whose leisure up to 1895 had been largely spent in writing poetry and fiction, and one of his novels still in print—"Child of Ocean"—is a sufficient indication that he might have become one of our leading literary figures of the past half century. As is shown by several of his earlier poems, he had been deeply, impressed by the amount of disease and poverty in India, and had observed how the prevalence of fevers largely accounted for this. As a doc-for he realized how little the medical observation, apart from other worries in securing insects and larvae, and arranging for the bottled insects to suck the blood of malarious pat-lents. Most of the mosquitoes dissected had been of a different sort from this dapple-winged type which had filled him with renewed hope. Now it looked as if this also was innocent.
A malaria carrier He was inclined to give up work for the day before finishing the mos-quite already on the microscope slide. Sweat streamed into his eyes, and the strain on his sight was made worse by a crack in the eye-piece. service armed with the only known prophylactic—quinine, and that necessarily in quite inadequate quantities—could do to suppress the epidemics of a disease which was transmitted by means that nobody understood.
Encouraged by Sir Patrick Manson in London, during his leave in.1894-5 Ross concentrated on the study of the connexion between mosquitoes and malaria, In 1878 a French army surgeon, Laveran, first observed the parasites of malaria in the blood of a human patient, by studying blood specimens under the microscope. This quickly led to further observations, and by 1885 the appearance of malaria parasites, as dark spots of pigment inside pale round cells which develop and throw off spores, had been noted in the blood of other animals and of birds.
In his own words—"I went carefully through the tissues with the same passion and care with which one would search some vast ruined cathedral for a little hidden treasure.
Nothing! No, these mosquitoes also were going to be a failure. There was something wrong with the theory. But the stomach tissues remained to be examined—lying there empty and flaccid before me on the glass slide: a great white expanse of cells like a courtyard of flagstones—each one of which must be scrutinized... But I was tired, what was the use?
But the Angel of Fate fortunately laid his hand upon my head.
He resumed work, and almost immediately saw a dark stain that ought not to have been there. He altered the focus of the microscope to make sure, and with rising excitement But only guesses had been made to how the malaria parasite got the blood and reproduced itself until the corpuscles were all infected. by the living spores. And though the guesses included mosquitoes, little was known about the insects and nobody knew for instance that the sort of mosquito infecting human beings might be different from those infecting birds or other animals, When Ross returned to India in 1895 determined to find out the truth, he himself hardly realized the magnitude of his task, for he had to incriminate the right species out of hundreds, and ascertain how the insect—if indeed it did. infect human bemgs—transmitted the parasites of the fever. In India the authorities were disinclined to favour research work by a member of the medical service, and the microscopic study of bacteria was still a new-fangled notion.
It was therefore after much active official, discouragement added to illness and the trying climate of the places where he most wanted to study malaria, that Ross made the great discovery of the pigmented cells of malaria in the tissues of a female Anopheles mosquito.
The weather, that August of 1897, was stifling, owing to the delayed monsoon, and Ross, working in his stuffy little laboratory at Secunderabad, was feeling exhausted after dissecting all but one of a batch of mosquitoes of a kind he had-not been able to dissect before. He had notice realized that he was looking a: the pigmented malaria parasite in 3 mos-quite, The next day he confirmed the observation. The parasite had grown larger. And in the last mosquito of the batch he found it again. He was soon able to show that the malaria parasite, sucked from a malarious person, passed through various stages, from the mosquito's stomach into the salivary gland and thence into the next human being that the insect bit. Only the females seek blood, the males being vegetarians, and it has been suggested that the purpose of sucking blood is connected with the development of their eggs.
Ross made some more neat entries in his note-book, sealed specimens to go with his report, and, characteristic cally, broke into verse: these three little stanzas being part of his famous series called In Exile which describes, like a poetic diary, his mental vicissitudes during the laborious researches in India:
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 million-murdering Death 1 know this little thing A myriad men will save.
Death, where is thy sting? Thy victory, O Grave?
It is by no means the best of the poems in the series but it is and deserves to be the most famous one. ed them before, as having dapple wings and by the way they stood with head sloping downwards. It seemed as if once more he was going to draw a blank. He had dissected about one thousand mosquitoes during the previous two years, and each insect dis-
The result of the discovery, as became apparent to the slowest intelligence, was that vast areas of the globe—desolated by malaria—might be made verily to blossom as the rose by applying the practical measures which Ross, quickly followed by
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.