Sir Ronald Ross(1857–1932)

Ronald Ross was born on 13 May 1857 at the British military cantonment at Almora in the Kumaon Hills of the Indian subcontinent, the eldest of ten children of Campbell Claye Grant Ross, a Highland Ross officer in the East India Company army then on his way up to General, and Matilda Charlotte Elderton. The Ross family came from Glenshiel in the western Highlands; his uncle had been killed at the relief of Lucknow earlier in 1857. He was sent back to Britain in 1865 at the age of eight, raised by an aunt at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, schooled at Springhill in Edinburgh, and matriculated at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London in 1875, more interested in writing poetry and composing songs than in his medical reading. He passed his medical examinations at the second attempt in 1879 and the surgical at the third in 1881.

He joined the Indian Medical Service in 1881 as an army surgeon and was posted variously to Madras, Burma, the Andaman Islands and Bangalore over the next sixteen years, treating the standard Imperial range of cholera, dysentery and malarial fevers in the cantonments and field hospitals. Malaria was the killing disease of the Empire; it carried off more British soldiers in India than any other cause through the second half of the nineteenth century, and the mechanism of its transmission was unknown. The leading theories blamed bad air, drinking water and damp ground. In 1894, on home leave in London, Ross sought out Patrick Manson, the Scottish physician who had shown in 1877 that the filariasis worm was transmitted by mosquitoes; Manson laid out for Ross over many afternoons the hypothesis that malaria might be transmitted by mosquitoes too. Ross returned to India in April 1895 determined to prove it.

For two years he chased the question through Secunderabad, Bangalore, Ootacamund and Calcutta, dissecting mosquitoes by candle in army huts at night, writing daily to Manson in London for advice, and getting nowhere; the mosquitoes he was studying, mostly Culex and Aedes, were not the right vectors. On 16 August 1897 at the Begumpet army hospital outside Secunderabad, his assistant Mahomed Bux brought him a batch of dappled-winged mosquitoes that had been fed on malaria patients; these were the Anopheles, a genus Ross had largely not worked on. Four days later, on 20 August 1897, he dissected the stomach wall of one of them and found the malaria parasite, in its oocyst form, embedded in the gut tissue of the mosquito. The mechanism had been proved. He wrote to Manson that afternoon: 'I have found thy secret out.' The 20th of August is now observed worldwide as Mosquito Day.

The 1897 finding was the half-discovery. Ross spent the next year in Calcutta proving in caged birds with avian malaria the complete life cycle of the parasite between bird and mosquito and back, work he completed in July 1898. The application to human malaria was made over the next two years by Italian researchers (Grassi, Bignami and Bastianelli) who showed the same cycle in human Anopheles in Rome. Ross argued for the rest of his life with Grassi over priority; the Nobel Committee in 1902, in awarding the second Physiology or Medicine prize to Ross alone, took the British side of the dispute. He took the prize money, the medal and the recognition badly: he had hoped Manson would share it.

He resigned the Indian Medical Service in 1899 to take the chair of Tropical Medicine at the new Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, which he held until 1912. The Liverpool school under his direction sent the first malaria-control expeditions to West Africa, the Suez Canal zone, Mauritius and Greece, and turned the 1897 finding into the public-health programme of mosquito drainage, larviciding and netting that reduced the malaria mortality of the British Empire by orders of magnitude over the next four decades. He was knighted KCB in 1911. He died on 16 September 1932 at the Ross Institute in London, the tropical-medicine research institute that bears his name, and is buried beside his wife Rosa in Putney Vale Cemetery. The Ross name today carries his memory as the surname of the Highland soldier-surgeon who pinned down the deadliest disease of the nineteenth-century Empire on the night of 20 August 1897 at a mosquito hut in Secunderabad.