A malaria problem ; On some peculiar pigmented cells found in two mosquitos (sic) fed on malarial blood / by Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross ; (With note by Surgeon-Major Smyth).

  • Ross, Ronald, Sir, 1857-1932.
Date:
[1897]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A malaria problem ; On some peculiar pigmented cells found in two mosquitos (sic) fed on malarial blood / by Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross ; (With note by Surgeon-Major Smyth). Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    Keprlnted from the British Medical Journal, December 18th, 1897. Long before Laveran's discovery of the parasite of malaria it had been conjectured that possibly the mosquito was in some way mixed up with the causation of this important class of disease. Subsequent to Laveran's discovery not only Laveran himself, but Koch, Pfeiffer, Bignami, and others attached importance to this idea. The facts that the malaria parasite is a blood parasite and, in its extra- corporeal state, paludal in habit, and that the mosquito is a blood sucker and also paludal in habit are extremely suggestive of such a connection. But the idea, though present to many men's minds, did not take definite form until Manson in our pages, and again in his Goulstonian Lectures, formulated a clear hypothesis on the subject. Fixing his attention on the well-established facts that all varieties of the malaria parasite possess a flagellating phase, that this phase is developed from what appear to be mature parasites, that it is evolved only when the parasite gets out- side the human body, that the flagella when formed tend to break away from what might be designated the parent parasite, that when free the flagella are capable of living for a time as independent organisms, Manson was led to regard the flagellated body as the earliest phase of the malaria parasite outside the human body, just as the rosette body, or rather the spores of which it is composed, are the firet phase of the parasite inside the human body. The flagellum he looked upon as being the extracorporeal homologue of the intracorporeal spore. Recent investigations by Pfeiffer, Simond, and others have proved that the malaria parasite is not the only organism of its class which is thus endowed with a flagellated phase, and that it is in harmony in this respect with other coccidia. Manson regarded the flagellum as a flagellated spore endowed with locomotive powers for a purpose, that purpose A MALARIA PROBLEM.