THIS week sees the centenary of the death of a remarkable Scottish physician, Sir Patrick Manson, known as the father of tropical medicine whose pioneering work in the field of parasitology paved the way for scientific discoveries that have saved the lives of countless millions of people.

Born in Oldmeldrum in Aberdeenshire on October 3, 1844, Manson died in London on April 9, 1922, at the age of 77. He was the second son of Alexander Manson, who was of Norwegian descent and ran the local Linen Bank as well as farming at Fingask. The Manson family were also involved in a local Scottish whisky distillery whose name is still extant – Glen Garioch.

Alexander and his wife Elizabeth Livingstone née Blaikie had nine children in all, and his mother’s middle name was proudly worn as she was a distant relative of the great explorer David Livingstone.

Patrick was said to be an ordinary child except for his innate curiosity and his extraordinary memory which saw him memorising sermons at the local kirk at the age of five. He was educated at the local school before the family moved to Aberdeen and he seemed set for an apprenticeship as an engineer but in 1869 he was struck down by Pott’s Disease, tuberculosis of the spine, which dictated a less physical profession for him.

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In 1860 he began to study medicine at Aberdeen University from where he graduated in 1865 after a series of visits to hospitals and medical schools in England. His first appointment was to Durham Lunatic Asylum where he was allowed to carry out 17 post-mortem examinations on deceased patients for his doctoral theses which earned him the degrees of Doctor of Medicine, Doctor of Surgery and Doctor of Law.

His brother David Manson was in the medical service in Shanghai, and Patrick followed him to the Far East in 1866 when he took the post of medical officer in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service of Formosa, now Taiwan. Part of his duties was to tend to Chinese patients and he quickly learned to speak Mandarin.

He became fascinated by tropical diseases and began to study them, and when he transferred to the Chinese mainland to the port of Amoy, now Xiamen, he began to specialise in researching filariasis, a common condition in the area that led to people developing elephantiasis.

Returning briefly to Scotland, Manson married Henrietta Isabella Thurburn in 1876. They would have six children in all, though the eldest died in infancy.

Manson’s breakthrough was to realise after much research that the filaria parasite was only present in his patients’ blood at night. He charted the life cycle of the parasitic worm and then conducted experiments on his gardener, Hin Lo, who had developed filariasis, and it was with Hin Lo that Manson made his most important discovery in 1877 – that mosquitoes were the interim hosts of the parasite.

Manson wrote: “I shall not easily forget the first mosquito I dissected. I tore off its abdomen and succeeded in expressing the blood the stomach contained. Placing this under the microscope, I was gratified to find that, so far from killing the Filaria, the digestive juices of the mosquito seemed to have stimulated it to fresh activity.”

His discovery was published the following year, and a few years later after much more research, Manson developed his theory that the humble mosquito might be the bearer of the parasite that caused malaria, then one of the biggest killers of people in the tropics. He published his hypothesis in the British Medical Journal which led to his famous correspondence with Ronald Ross, the Indian-born Scottish doctor who would eventually prove that malaria was indeed transmitted by mosquitos.

That discovery would win Ross both a knighthood and a Nobel Prize. Manson, being a modest man, was upset only by the fact that Ross neglected to mention him when accepting the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902. Manson was also nominated for the Nobel award but never received it.

Manson was meanwhile carrying out further research having moved to Hong Kong. But it was his parasitological research that saw him become a world leader in the field. The Aberdeen Medico-Chirurgical Society describes his work on their website: “Manson was a pioneer in advancing the science and understanding of other parasitic diseases as well as many aspects of public health. He discovered the dog lung fluke ( Dirofilaria), described ankylostomiasis (hookworm), leishmaniasis, trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), schistosomiasis (Bilharzia), typhoid, diphtheria, plague and encouraged smallpox vaccination. He also described a number of nutritional deficiency disease common in the tropics.”

The National:

While in Hong Kong, Manson founded the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, the forerunner of Hong Kong University.

Manson moved to London in 1889, and 10 years later, having been appointed Chief Medical Office to the Colonial Office, he used his influence to found the London School of Tropical Medicine, now the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Knighted in 1903, Manson literally wrote the book on tropical diseases – his Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates is still in print.

Manson retired from the Colonial Office in 1912 and was able to indulge his love of fishing at his second home in County Galway in Ireland.

After his death in this week of 1922, Manson’s body was taken to Aberdeen where he lies buried in Allenvale Cemetery.