Bitten by the B'lore bug

LEGENDARY CONNECTION

It was in Bangalore that Ronald Ross first became interested in mosquitoes. Ross would go on to make the crucial discovery of plasmodium, the malarial parasite, in a mosquito, and win the Nobel too. Bangaloreans can truthfully say that the seeds of that great discovery were sown in our City, writes Meera Iyer

In September 1883, a British doctor named Ronald Ross was appointed the Acting Garrison Surgeon in the Bangalore Civil and Military Station. The doctor initially stayed in a bungalow close to today’s MG Road. He records in his memoirs that this was when he first became interested in mosquitoes. “They devoured me,” he writes, “until I discovered that they were breeding in a tub just outside my window.” Ross got rid of the wee beasties by the simple expedient of tipping the tub. So began a series of experiments and observations on mosquitoes that eventually led to a Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1902.

Ronald Ross was born in Almora, Uttarakhand, on May 13, 1857, three days after the Indian Mutiny or the First War of Independence began. He grew up in Almora, Nainital and Benares and was sent to England for his education when he was eight. 

The future scientist and Nobel Prize winner displayed no interest whatsoever in science but took wholeheartedly to painting, literature and the arts. He wrote poetry while still at school and at 17, decided he wanted to be a writer. But his father wanted him to join the Indian Medical Service, and so Ross resignedly joined St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School in London to study medicine. Ross wrote more poetry and even some short plays while at St Bartholomew’s but remained quite indifferent to medicine. He failed a qualifying exam for the Indian Medical Service, cleared it a year later on his second attempt, and then joined the Service. Ross came to India in 1882, stayed in Madras briefly and then had the first of many stints in Bangalore when he was given medical charge of a unit of the Madras Infantry for a few weeks. 

Like many others before and after him, Ross loved Bangalore. He describes how he used to go for long walks every day among “rocky crests of mountains, fir woods, dells with beautiful little trickles of streamlets”. The sun and the breeze, he says, “were those not of earth but of heaven.” In a complaint that sounds all too familiar to us today, Ross says that when he looked for these same places ten years later, he found they had all been swallowed by development.

Over the next few years, Ross returned to Bangalore several times and also served in Quetta, Burma and the Andamans. He churned out more plays, novels and dramas, became very interested in mathematics, played a lot of tennis, whist and golf, but remained a completely ordinary doctor. It was only when he was on leave in England in 1888 that something ignited a spark in him: “I determined now to interest myself much more in my profession,” he writes, and he returned to India with renewed vigour.

Back to Bangalore

Ross was posted in Bangalore once again in 1890, as Staff Surgeon of the Civil and Military Station. Now married, he and his family lived in High Grounds, “in a delightful house facing the golf ground, called Uplands”. (Incidentally, this very house was where Sir M Visvesvaraya stayed for a time after his retirement in 1908). According to his Nobel lecture, it was during this 1890-1893 period in Bangalore that Ross made his first studies of malaria. 

He also wrote his first research papers on the disease, including some that rejected the ‘bad air’ theory but speculated (wrongly, of course) that malaria might have an intestinal cause.

In the 1890s, scientists had begun to realise that parasites in blood caused malaria, but no one had any idea how these parasites moved from sick people to healthy people. In 1894, while on leave in England, Ross sought out Patrick Manson, a tropical disease expert who had recently discovered that mosquitoes spread the disease filariasis.

Manson told Ross he believed mosquitoes also spread malaria. This was the beginning of a long association between the two scientists.

Ross returned to India, and plunged into research, determined to prove Manson’s ‘Grand Induction’ as he called it. 

Within a few months, Ross became an expert on dissecting mosquitoes, identifying parasites and diagnosing malaria. In his memoirs, Ross states that from April 1895 to February 1899, he wrote 110 letters to Manson about his research, “containing almost exactly 1,000 words each, or about one word to every ten people killed by malaria in India alone every year.”

At West End

But another disease also killed hundreds in India in those days. In 1895, Ross was called to Bangalore on special sanitary duty to contain the frequent cholera outbreaks here, especially in Shivajinagar, Ulsoor and parts of the pete. 

Ross took up residence in a tent on the grounds of the (now Taj) West End Hotel. Over the next two years, he organised an overhaul of refuse-cleaning systems, suggested improvements in drainage, mapped the locations of wells and had them disinfected, and posted hospital assistants at stations to detect cases. He also frequently accompanied scavengers in their early morning work. “These experiences are not easily forgotten,” he writes. 

Of the scavengers, “the poor men themselves, the last pariahs and outcasts of society, toiling while others slept,” says Ross, “None shall know of your labour, no one shall thank you, you shall die forgotten,” and yet, “the civilisation of the thronged cities was based upon their labour.” Though occupied by his sanitary work, Ross still eked out time for malaria. Until then, both he and Manson had thought that when malarial mosquitoes died, they somehow infected the water they bred in, which when ingested, caused malaria in humans. It was in Bangalore that Ross came up with another hypothesis that later proved correct: In May 1896, he wrote to Manson, “…the belief is growing on me that the disease is communicated by the bite of the mosquito. She always injects a small quantity of fluid with her bite — what if the parasites get into the system in this manner.” 

Ross set out to test this hypothesis by the decidedly questionable method of getting mosquitoes to bite volunteers, mostly ‘natives’ of course, including the Assistant Surgeon of the Bowring Civil Hospital.

But as Ross had yet to discover that only the Anopheles mosquito carried the malarial parasite, his results remained negative. It wasn’t until 20 August 1897 (now commemorated as World Mosquito Day), when Ross was posted in Secunderabad, that he made the crucial discovery of a Plasmodium, the malarial parasite, in a mosquito. He came back to Bangalore on short leave a month later, staying at the West End once again (in a room this time, and not a tent!), and wrote up his exciting discovery. The paper, "On some Peculiar Pigmented Cells found in two Mosquitoes fed on Malarial Blood," appeared in the British Medical Journal in December 1897.

In Secunderabad, the building where Ronald Ross made his landmark discovery is now called the Sir Ronald Ross Institute, and bears a plaque in appreciation of Ross’s work. But Bangaloreans can truthfully say that the seeds of that great discovery were sown in our City.

ROSS, THE POET

* Ronald Ross was known to be a poet, novelist and painter.
* His collection of poems include: ‘psychologies’, ‘Poems’, and ‘Fables and Satires’. He composed this verse about his first impressions of malaria that killed millions:

In this, O Nature, yield I pray to me.I pace and pace, and think and think, and takeThe 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 obscureThe unseen, small, but million-murdering cause.

(Courtesy: malariasite.com)