Discovery
Ross studied malaria between 1882 and 1899. He worked on malaria at the Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta. Ross built a bungalow with a laboratory at Mahanad village, where he used to stay from time to time collecting mosquitoes in Mahanad and adjoining villages and conducting research. In 1883, Ross was posted as the Acting Garrison Surgeon at Bangalore during which time he noticed the possibility of controlling mosquitoes by controlling their access to water.
In 1897, Ross was posted in Ooty and fell ill with malaria. After this he was transferred to Secunderabad, where Osmania University and its medical school is located. He discovered the presence of the malarial parasite within a specific species of mosquito, of the genus Anopheles. He initially called them dapple-wings.He was able to find the malaria parasite in a mosquito that he artificially fed on a malaria patient named Hussain Khan.
In 1902, Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his remarkable work on malaria. His assistant, Kishori Mohan Bandyopadhyay, was awarded a gold medal. In 1899, Ross went to Britain and joined Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine as a professor. In 1901 Ross was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and also a Fellow, of which he became Vice-President from 1911 to 1913. In 1902 he was appointed a Companion of the Most Honourable Order of Bath by King Edward VII, and discovered how malaria was transmitted. In 1911 he was elevated to the rank of Knight Commander of the same Order.
During his active career Ross advocated the task of prevention of malaria in different countries. He carried out surveys and initiated schemes in many places, including West Africa, the Suez Canal zone, Greece, Mauritius, Cyprus, and in the areas affected by the First World War. He also initiated organisations, which have proved to be well established, for the prevention of malaria within the planting industries of India and Sri Lanka, and declared 20 August World Mosquito Day. He made many contributions to the epidemiology of malaria and to methods of its survey and assessment. Perhaps his greatest was the development of mathematical models for the study of its epidemiology, initiated in his report on Mauritius in 1908, elaborated in his Prevention of malaria in 1911 and further elaborated in a more generalised form in scientific papers published by the Royal Society in 1915 and 1916. These papers represented a profound mathematical interest which was not confined to epidemiology, but led him to make material contributions to both pure and applied mathematics.
Through these works Ross continued his great contribution in the form of the discovery of the transmission of malaria by the mosquito. He also found time and mental energy for many other pursuits, being a poet, playwright, writer and painter. Particularly, his poetic works gained him wide acclaim which was independent of his medical and mathematical standing.
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