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icon-people Sir Ronald Ross 1857 - 1932

1857-1932, bacteriologist, Scottish; British

As a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, Ronald Ross proved in 1897 the long-suspected link between mosquitoes and malaria. In doing so he confirmed the hypotheses previously put forward independently by scientists Alphonse Laveran and Sir Patrick Manson. Ross was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902.

Born in India, where his father was based as a soldier, Ross had seen the devastation caused by malaria at first hand, but it was not until 1892 that he began to study it scientifically. By this time, both Laveran and Manson - Ross’s mentor - had observed the presence of a parasite in blood samples taken from patients suffering from the disease.

In August 1897, Ross made his crucial discovery. While dissecting the stomach of a mosquito fed on the blood a malaria victim, he found the previously observed parasite. Through further study he established the complete life cycle of this parasitic organism (plasmodium). He was knighted in 1911 and in 1926 became Director of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, which was founded in his honour.

Related Objects

Dissecting microscope used by Sir Ronald Ross (monocular dissecting microscopes)

Ross "pop" safety valve (safety valve).

Portable microscope, 1891-1910 (compound monocular microscopes; monocular microscopes; microscopes)

Plaster plaque depicting Sir Ronald Ross who investigated malaria mosquito (personal plaques)

Box for dissecting microscope used by sir ronald ross (box).

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Sir Ronald Ross: A Man of Many Talents

Written by andrew mcainsh on april 25, 2014.

Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932) is one of the best known names in the study of malaria. His work allows us to understand how malaria is transmitted to humans by a malarial parasite carried in the gastrointestinal tract of the Anopheles mosquito. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902 for his contributions to the malariology, and his work in malaria is generally held to be the crowning achievement of his career.

Sir Ronald was also a true polymath in possession of a great mind which was only partly occupied by malaria research. He was also a published novelist, a poet, an advocate of spelling reform, an artist and a mathematician. For our latest exhibition, we had a look through the College’s  Ross Collection and selected some of his work from outside the field of malariology. The Ross Collection makes up about half of the papers of Sir Ronald Ross (the other half is known as the Ross Archive, held by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine ) and includes items covering Ross’s works in medicine, mathematics, literature and spelling reform, as well as his time at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the War Office and the Ross Institute. Ross meticulously collected and organised almost all of his correspondence, notebooks and works in progress, as well as press clippings about his work and other ephemera, so the Ross Collection is one of the largest archives held by the College.

Despite his contributions to medicine, Ross’s primary pleasure in life was literature, and he expressed regret in later life that he had devoted so much time to medicine at the expense of his true passion. He wrote a number of novels, mostly during his spare time while working in the Indian Medical Service. His first novel, The Child of Ocean (1899) is described as a romance and a later book, The Revels of Orsera (1930), is a fantasy novel which still has something of a cult following today. Manuscript drafts and notes for both editions of The Child of Ocean , plus another unfinished draft for a novel, can be found in the Ross Collection.

Ross’s 2nd draft of ‘Child of Ocean’

Ross wrote a large number of poems, many of which remain unpublished and can only be found in manuscript form in the Ross Collection. Of the ones that were published, the majority are collected in Selected Poems (1928) and In Exile (1931). As with his novels, Ross kept all the different drafts and versions of his poetry, filling dozens of notebooks in the collection. Below you can see some early versions of poems that were eventually published in the collection Lyra Modulata (1931).

Early drafts of poems from ‘Lyra Modulata’

Spelling Reform

Ronald Ross had a wide range of interests outside medicine. One area in which he was particularly interested was spelling reform, and he made a number of attempts to develop simple phonetic spelling systems. The most noteworthy of these attempts were known as Aesthetic Spelling, Musaic Spelling, and Simplified Spelling . Ross would often use famous pieces of literature, particularly well known poems, to demonstrate his alternative spelling systems. Indeed, his system of  Musaic Spelling was designed specifically for use in poetry. Here is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard rendered in Ross’s musaic spelling, with the original text for comparison.

Gray’s ‘Elegy’ rendered in Musaic spelling

And here is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonaïs rendered in Aesthetic Spelling:

Shelley’s ‘Adonaïs’ in Aesthetic spelling

Mathematics

Although Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on malaria, he considered his work in mathematics (particularly epidemiological mathematics) to be of even greater scientific importance. He published 5 short books on mathematics, and the Ross Collection includes a large number of notebooks filled with equations and notes on maths. His greatest contribution in this field was probably to do with pathometry (a word apparently invented by Ross to indicate the mathematical study of epidemics and the progress of diseases). In 1916 Ross was given a government grant of £150 to hire a mathematical worker, and the pair worked on a three part paper to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The paper was eventually published as a standalone pamphlet, entitled A Priori Pathometry . A bundle of notes and a few different working copies and drafts of this publication can be found in the Ross Collection.

Items from the Ross Collection are on display in Crush Hall until 9th May. This area and the Library Reading Room are open to members of the public on Monday afternoons from 2pm to 5pm, and visitors are welcome at other times by appointment. For more information, email us at [email protected] or telephone 0141 221 6072.

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[…] in these novels and collections of poetry and song. This section is dominated by the malariologist Sir Ronald Ross, who was a noted polymath and wrote several literary works during his life. Ross’s mathematical […]

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The College’s heritage collections – including thousands of medical and surgical instruments, rare books, archives, and pictures – span over 6 centuries and are an excellent resource for exploring the history of medicine and the history of the city of Glasgow. Many items from the collections have been digitised and are available to view here. Our digitisation work is ongoing, and we add new items to the site regularly, so keep checking back to discover more.

The Poet Who Conquered Malaria: Medical Humanities and the Public Understanding of Science

Blog by Dr Emilie Taylor-Pirie

In the sweltering heat of British India, a doctor was working late one evening in his laboratory. His scalpel glinted with the sweat from his brow as he dissected his 1000th mosquito, gently separating the flesh of the thorax from the abdomen. He was tired, a little feverish, and about to give up and go to bed when he saw them. Tiny speckled dots—plasmodium parasites—peppering the cells beneath the lens of his microscope. This was his eureka moment.

December 2022 marks 120 years since Britain won its very first Nobel Prize. It was given to Scottish pathologist Ronald Ross for proving that mosquitoes transmit malaria.

Ross had made a groundbreaking discovery—today vector control (targeting the mosquitoes that transmit the malaria parasite) is still the cornerstone of the World Health Organisation’s anti-malaria strategy.

As a member of the Indian Medical Service and later professor at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Ross gained fame as an authority on science. He published widely on malaria prevention, invented a diagnostic microscope, and led several expeditions to West Africa funded by the Royal Society. He gave one of the earliest BBC radio lectures—broadcast to over a million—in March 1924, a month before George V would become the first British monarch to speak on the radio.

And yet, few people outside medicine have heard of Ronald Ross, despite his potential as a pub quiz answer. Who was the first British Nobel laureate? (I first heard about Ross during my biology degree—a cell in the gut of the mosquito is named after him: the Ross cell).

Those who have heard of him likely know him through a poem he wrote moments after his discovery:

This day relenting God Hath placed within my hand A wonderous 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? [1]

Ross’s poem is dutifully trotted out on World Mosquito Day (20th August), which is celebrated annually on the very day that Ross saw those speckled dots. But the fact that he wrote poetry is not simply a fun piece of trivia to be filed away with the knowledge that Romantic poet John Keats was trained in medicine or that we share 60 percent of our genes with bananas.

Rather, Ross’s poetry is an integral part of the history of malaria. In 1910 Ross had published an anthology of poetry in tandem with a textbook on malaria perceiving the two works as complementary threads to the story of his discovery. It included that famous stanza, which was reprinted in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet , in national and regional newspapers, in articles, in op-eds, and in biographies. Additionally, it appeared in posthumous radio plays, adorned the menus at anniversary luncheons, and was even chiselled into stone—on a monument erected to Ross in Calcutta in 1927.

Viewed as a lyrical rendition of his “eureka moment,” the poem took the British imagination by storm, earning Ross a reputation as “the poet who conquered malaria.” For many it provided an access point for the public understanding of science. The poem laid bare the emotional stakes of medical research, providing a humanising narrative to counter the imagined objectivity of experimental science.

Whilst working as a doctor in the Indian Medical Service, Ross frequently turned to poetry to express the frustrations he felt at the limits of scientific medicine:

In this, O Nature, yield I pray to me, I pace and pace, and think and think, and take The fever’d hands, and note down all I see, That some dim distant light may haply break.   The painful faces ask, can we not cure? We answer, No, not yet; we seek the laws. O God, reveal thro’ all this thing obscure The unseen, small, but million-murdering cause.

Following his discovery, Ross received letters from would-be patients wanting diagnoses, doctors wanting advice, even fans wanting autographs. Many correspondents used poetry as a kind of shorthand, quoting his verses or penning their own to convey their affection, to lay bare their admiration, to communicate in-jokes, or to offer commentary on the medical profession.

Thus, poetry was not just a strategy for communicating science to the public, or a means of processing emotion, but a language in which to express the social and political aspects of malaria prevention.

Ross himself believed that poetry and science were kindred practices; he even gave a lecture on the subject at the Royal Institution in 1920. For him, the perseverance and problem solving of the scientific imagination was embodied in the meticulous design of poetic form.

Fellow parasitologist Ronald Campbell Macfie insisted that “it was the great poet in him that made him a great man of science […]. The same fine faithful technique that found the microbe in the mosquito finds the precise immortal word. The same surgent imagination that inspired his poetry surges in his science.” [2]

Ross was born a Victorian in a period famous for its polymaths, but he lived and worked through the very different professional culture of the twentieth century. Towards the end of Ross’s life, his friend and biographer Rodolphe Louis Mégroz claimed that whilst Ross had gained “undying fame as a medical scientist,” he had “begun as a poet, and remained essentially a poet.” [3] It was a claim with significant narrative appeal, implying a crossover skill set that was—by the 1930s—thought of as rare and special.

A medical humanities approach to the history of malaria spotlights the cultural contexts that mediate the relationship between science and society, helping us to reflect on our own disciplinary landscape with its unwritten—and sometimes written—assumptions about the arts and sciences. Government funding initiatives pit STEM against the arts and humanities, revealing a higher education system that siloes the so-called “creative” subjects from the more “objective” ones. There is a tacit assumption that people are “naturally” suited to one “type” of subject.

But change is afoot. Across the country we see the emergence of centres for cross-disciplinary collaboration, grant funding for interdisciplinary research, and degree programmes focusing on problem-based learning by scaffolding knowledge from multiple subjects. These innovations challenge the false dichotomy of Science and Art (there are many sciences and many arts), recognising that STEM students can—and should—employ critical and reflective tools from the arts and humanities and that the latter subjects can use scientific methodologies to enrich their own practices.

The recent anniversary of Britain’s very first Nobel Prize should remind us that medicine and the humanities have long been productive bedfellows, helping us to understand the dynamic entanglements between science and culture.

[1] Ronald Ross, “Reply” in Philosophies (London: John Murray, 1910).

[2] Ronald Campbell Macfie, “Poems by Sir Ronald Ross,” The Bookman (September 1928): 315.

[3] R. L. Mégroz, “Ronald Ross as Fiction Writer,” The Bookman (October 1930): 15.

Dr Emilie Taylor-Pirie is a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She holds a BSc in Biology and higher degrees in the humanities. Her research interests encompass the history of medicine and medical humanities and include tropical medicine, gut health, and the public understanding of science.

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Remembering Ronald Ross and 6 other great scientists who have won the Nobel Prize for discovering lifesaving medicine

Ronald ross, a british medical doctor who linked the disease of malaria to mosquitoes, was born in almora, in present-day uttarakhand, india..

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Ronald Ross, a British medical doctor who linked the disease of Malaria to mosquitoes, was born in Almora, in present-day Uttarakhand on May 13,1857. For his work on the transmission of the disease, Ross received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902.

Ross made the path breaking medical discovery while he was working at the Indian Medical Service. After serving for 25 years in India, Ross, in 1926, became the Director-in-Chief of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases, which was established in honour of his works.

Let's take a look at 7 such historical breakthroughs in medicine and physiology that bagged a Nobel:

1 cure to diphtheria.

2 Identification of malaria

3 Discovery of Insulin

4 Discovery of blood groups

5 Functions of neurons

6 Discovery of Penicillin

An Unsung Indian behind Ronald Ross's Success

During colonial period British people has used Indian talents but hardly gave them any recognition. Radhanath Sikdar is well known example of this. Here I have unearth another unsung scientist who is really unknown. A lot of research work is needed on him to find out his exact contribution.

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July 19, 2019

How Poetry Can Help Communicate Science

It can break down the barriers that separate experts from the rest of us

By Sam Illingworth

Masego Morulane Getty Images

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

At first glance, poetry might seem to have very little to offer science, other than a few choice compliments or cursory remarks. However, it can be an extremely effective medium through which to communicate new research and even advance scientific knowledge.

About five years ago I started a blog, The Poetry of Science , where every week I read a piece of scientific research and translate these findings and their context into an original piece of poetry. This blog has now been read by tens of thousands of people, and has led to research publications , new collaborations and even poetry for Scientific American . Writing this blog also inspired me to investigate which other scientists have written poetry, leading to the research and publication of my new book, A Sonnet to Science .

In this book, I present a series of biographies of six influential scientists, highlighting the impact that poetry had on their lives and research. In writing this book I discovered how Ada Lovelace’s insights into computer programming were made possible by her poetic talent, how Ronald Ross made the first recordings of the link between mosquitoes and malaria in verse, and how James Clerk Maxwell used poetry to warn against the dangers of extreme scientific materialism. Writing this book also cemented my belief that science and poetry offer complementary, rather than antagonistic, ways of making sense of the world in which we live.

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However, despite what I hope to achieve with both The Poetry of Science and A Sonnet to Science , these are primarily one-way methods of communication. Yes, they introduce scientific research to a wider public and highlight the historical relationship between scientists and poetry, but do they actually make science more accessible to nonscientists? For me, the real power of poetry comes in its capacity to develop meaningful dialogue between scientists and nonscientists, and how it can give voice to the previously underheard and underserved.

Scientists are not the only experts who exist in society. Everyone is an expert in something, across their personal and professional lives, and this expertise represents a significant data set that it would be unscientific to neglect. For example, if your research involves assessing the arability of local farmland, then farmers, landowners and others possess an expertise that should be considered. However, in developing dialogue between scientists and nonscientists, the letters that come after a scientist’s name reinforce the notion (amongst all parties) that they are the sole source of expertise.

Poetry can help to break down this notion, creating a platform through which all voices are given equal space and weight. By writing and sharing poetry together, nonscientists are given permission to express their opinions, and scientists are given permission to express their emotions. This creates a sense of shared vulnerability which helps to remind people that scientists are part of society; once you hear a professor stand up and read a forcibly rhymed sonnet about the intricacies of fluvial dynamics, you realise that they are indeed fallible. It is not the aesthetic quality of the poems that are important here but rather the construction of them that enables ideas and experiences to be meaningfully exchanged.  

I would like to demonstrate the power of this approach by using an example from my own research. Environmental change is something that affects all members of society, not just those who research it. And in many instances, it is the more vulnerable members of society who are the most affected by these changes, despite their often being the least responsible. In discussing environmental change, it is therefore essential to give voice to these communities, as doing so can highlight why certain mitigation strategies might be ineffective.

Over the course of several weeks, I facilitated a series of poetry-writing workshops between scientists and a group of Manchester, U.K., residents who were living with severe mental health needs. These sessions involved writing poetry about topics that the nonscientists were interested in, and then using these as a starting point for discussions. In one of these sessions the focus was on air pollution, resulting in one of the local residents writing the following poem:

I’ve never seen pollution Never noticed it It’s always been here But I’m unaware of it Just breathing it in

These five lines demonstrate the need for all voices to be heard, and how poetry can be used to engender this. Poetry and science should not be treated as disparate disciplines, but instead should be considered as colleagues who together have the potential to diversify and develop science. Bringing together scientists and nonscientists through poetry can give voice to the underheard, giving those who can enact change an opportunity to listen.