October 13, 1923] 



NATURE 



541 



The Management of Medical Research.^ 



By Sir Ronald Ross, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., F.R.S. 



TWENTY years have now elapsed since I had the 

 honour and pleasure of addressing Anderson's 

 )llege Medical School at the opening of its winter 

 »ssion of 1903. This is, indeed, only a short interval 

 cosmic time ; for — to use a figure which will exhibit 

 le rapidity of scientific advance nowadays — all these 

 ^ears amount only to twenty vibrations of the electron 

 rhich we call the earth round its nucleus the sun, in 

 lis atom which we name the solar system ! However, 

 )r us it has been a considerable period. Many of those 

 irho faced me twenty years ago as students are now 

 Placed in the seats of the mighty, and will, I hope, 

 ipport what I have to say to-day. Alas ! two of the 

 ices with which I was then familiar are missing — 

 'rof. R. S. Thomson, dean of the Medical Faculty, 

 id Sir James Marwick ; some of the distinguished men 

 i^ho were helping us — Dr. Laveran, Dr. Robert Koch, 

 Sir Patrick Manson, Sir William Osier, Lord Lister, 

 >ir Alfred Jones, Sir Rubert Boyce — are no more ; and, 

 p,bove all, I must mourn that great pupil of the School, 

 ruler of many Colonies, and my own master, friend, 

 id supporter. Sir William MacGregor. 

 On that occasion my address was entitled " Medical 

 ;ience and the Empire," and in it I described the 

 forts which we were making to reduce malaria in 

 Jritish possessions. Four years previously we had 

 Verified, corrected, and completed the old conjectures 

 fehat malaria is carried in some way by mosquitoes ; 

 id three years previously the Americans had proved 

 le similar conjectures regarding yellow fever. Schools 

 ^f Tropical Medicine had been established in Liverpool 

 id London, and were about to be created in many 

 Darts of the world. At that time I myself hoped that 

 lalaria would be banished in a few years from all our 

 i)rincipal cities in the tropics ; and I had visited West 

 frica from Liverpool on three occasions for that 

 purpose. I shall never forget the assistance rendered 

 luring my second and third visits by two Glasgow 

 len, the late Mr. James Coats, who gave us two 

 lousand pounds to start our anti-malaria work in 

 Sierra Leone, and Dr. M. Logan Taylor, who remained 

 West Africa for two years, carrying out the practical 

 leasures and trying to persuade the local authorities 

 continue them. 

 My address — which I believe was not published, but 

 ^hich I still possess — was full of that morning en- 

 lusiasm. I argued that the time had already come 

 irhen medical science could revolutionise the tropics ; 

 irhen it could render them worth living in by banishing 

 le great endemic diseases which overshadowed them ; 

 ^hen it could assist civilisation (coming from the 

 temperate regions of the earth) to conquer the rich 

 regions of the Sun and of the Palm. I even dared to 

 quote the great words of the poet regarding Columbus, 

 that he 



" Gave to man the godlike gift of half a world ; " 



and I hoped that we should l^e able to do the same. 

 This had been the faith which had compelled us — 



' An address delivered to the Anderson College of Medicine, Glasgow, on 

 October 9, at the opening of the winter session. 



NO. 2815, VOL. I 12] 



others besides myself — for many years : not to add to 

 abstract science, not merely for the sake of parasitology 

 or entomology, not to compile text-books or to fill 

 libraries ; but to help the sick and the dying — millions 

 of them — and so to open up the world. When I 

 last spoke to you I hoped that all this was going to be 

 done in a year or two ! I am wiser now. Kipling says 

 that we must not try to hustle the East ; so, I have 

 found, we must not try to hustle the West either ! 

 Men think slowly. It requires a new generation to 

 understand a new idea, even the simplest one. 



Some notable advances have, however, been made. 

 Mosquito-reduction against malaria was first urged and 

 defined by us in Sierra Leone in 1899 ; and was com- 

 menced there by Logan Taylor and myself two years 

 later in 1901, and, almost simultaneously, by the 

 Americans under W. C. Gorgas in Havana, and by 

 Malcolm Watson in the Federated Malay States. In 

 1902 Sir William MacGregor and I visited Ismailia on 

 the Suez Canal — with the result that malaria was 

 banished from that town within a few months. Then 

 the Americans commenced the construction of the 

 Panama Canal, with Gorgas as chief of their sanitary 

 staff, and kindly asked me to visit Panama in order to 

 see them at work in 1904. The result is well-known 

 — the Canal is now finished, with a minimum loss of 

 life. But you are probably not so familiar with the 

 equally great work of Malcolm Watson in the Federated 

 Malay States — because it is merely a British achieve- 

 ment ! For more than twenty years he and his 

 friends have fought on against King Malaria and all 

 his allies — rain, heat, jungle, marsh, and ignorance — 

 and is gradually winning forward, step by step. While 

 Gorgas had behind him the full official support of the 

 wealthy American nation, Watson and other British 

 workers in this line have been mostly obliged to rely 

 only upon private initiative and such small funds as 

 they could rake together for their purpose. Not less 

 important has been the work of the entomologists, 

 from F. V. Theobald onwards ; but I am not now 

 narrating the history of this movement, or I could 

 speak of many other brave efforts made during these 

 last twenty years. Not perhaps quite as much as I 

 had hoped for, but still something. What may be 

 called " economic sanitation " among our troops, our 

 officials, and our large and numerous plantations, has 

 been greatly improved, and thousands of lives and 

 thousands upon thousands of cases of sickness have 

 been saved. Perhaps, even already, we may echo the 

 words of the Duke of Wellington : " Yes, 'twas a 

 famous victory." 



During the same period science has won or is 

 winning many other victories as great. As regards 

 tropical medicine, we have been advancing against 

 plague, cholera, typhoid, sleeping-sickness, kala-azar, 

 hook-worm, beri-beri, bilharzia, and leprosy ; and as 

 regards the diseases of temperate climates, we have 

 diminished child-mortality, diphtheria, tuberculosis, 

 numerous ailments due to local infections or to physio- 

 logical insufficiencies, such as myxoedema, and, quite 

 recently, have inflicted a defeat upon diabetes. We 



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