Portrait photo of Sir Patrick Manson. Photo around the 1890s.
School period
College/University
Gallery of Patrick Manson
King's College, Aberdeen AB24 3FX, UK
Manson became a student at the University of Aberdeen School of Medicine in 1860 and completed medicine course in 1865. He was only nineteen and was underage for graduation, so he visited hospitals, museums and medical schools in London. Finally of age, he formally graduated in October 1865 with a Bachelor of Medicine degree. In 1866 he received his Master of Surgery, Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Law degrees.
Career
Gallery of Patrick Manson
1901
London, City of London, United Kingdom
Manson teaching at the Albert Dock Seamen's Hospital 1901.
Gallery of Patrick Manson
1905
United Kingdom
Sir Patrick Manson with his grandchildren. Photo around the 1900s.
Gallery of Patrick Manson
1905
United Kingdom
Photo of Sir Patrick Manson from around the 1900s.
Gallery of Patrick Manson
1905
Portrait photo of Sir Patrick Manson. Photo around the 1900s.
Gallery of Patrick Manson
1905
Portrait photo of Sir Patrick Manson. Photo around the 1900s.
Gallery of Patrick Manson
1907
United Kingdom
Sir Patrick Manson, the 'father' of Tropical Medicine and mentor of the London School of Tropical Medicine's first lecturer Ronald Ross.
Gallery of Patrick Manson
1907
United Kingdom
Portrait photo of Sir Patrick Manson. Photo around the end of the 1900s.
Gallery of Patrick Manson
1919
China
Patrick Manson experimenting with filaria sanguinis-hominis on a human subject in China. Painting by E. Board, circa 1912.
Achievements
Membership
Royal College of Physicians
Patrick Manson was a member of the Royal College of Physicians.
Royal Society
Patrick Manson was a member of the Royal Society.
Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
Patrick Manson was a member of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Awards
The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George
Manson became a student at the University of Aberdeen School of Medicine in 1860 and completed medicine course in 1865. He was only nineteen and was underage for graduation, so he visited hospitals, museums and medical schools in London. Finally of age, he formally graduated in October 1865 with a Bachelor of Medicine degree. In 1866 he received his Master of Surgery, Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Law degrees.
Sir Patrick Manson was a British physician and parasitologist. He founded the field of tropical medicine.
Background
Patrick Manson was born on October 3, 1844, at Cromlet Hill in Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom. He was the second son of a family of five sons and four daughters. His father, Alexander Manson, was a manager of the local branch of the British Linen Bank and Laird of Fingask. His mother, who exercised a profound influence upon him up to the time of her death at the age of eighty-eight, was Elizabeth Livingstone Blaikie, a distant cousin of David Livingstone the explorer, and a member of a well-known local family named Blaikie. Among his Presbyterian-Christian family, he showed excellent memory for memorizing church sermons at the age of 5 years.
Education
In his youth, Manson was considered rather dull by his teacher, who complained that he spent too much of his time shooting partridges and rabbits and too little on classical education. At the age of eleven, he shot a savage cat and “extracted from its innards a long tapeworm,” his first practical exercise in parasitology.
In 1857 the family moved to Aberdeen, where Manson attended the Gymnasium and the West End Academy. His mother’s family owned a large engineering works in the city, to which, at the age of fourteen, Manson became apprenticed. He undertook the heavy work so enthusiastically that he developed curvature of the spine and a partial paresis of the right arm, which for the next six months forced him to spend most of each day lying on his back. Nevertheless, for two hours daily he contrived to study natural history at Marischal College, which so stimulated his interest in science that, upon learning that his work would count as part of the medical curriculum, he decided not to return to engineering but to devote his life to medicine.
Manson became a student at the University of Aberdeen School of Medicine in 1860 and completed medicine course in 1865. He was only nineteen and was underage for graduation, so he visited hospitals, museums and medical schools in London. Finally of age, he formally graduated in October 1865 with a Bachelor of Medicine degree. In 1866 he received his Master of Surgery, Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Law degrees.
Manson's first appointment became an assistant medical officer at the Durham County Mental Asylum. He remained in Durham for only a year. Persuaded by his elder brother, then working in Shanghai, to travel overseas, he obtained the post of medical officer for Formosa in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, where his official duties were to inspect ships calling at the port of Takao (now Kaohsiung) and to treat their crews. Of this work, he kept a careful diary now preserved at Manson House in London, in which he made detailed descriptions of cases of elephantiasis, leprosy, and “heart disease” - which he later recognized as beriberi.
In 1871 Manson settled at Amoy on the mainland of China. His private practice there and his post at the Baptist Missionary Hospital provided him with an immense number of cases that added greatly to his experience. His special interest in elephantiasis led him to devise surgical procedures for removing the masses of tissue associated with the disease, of which, it is recorded, he removed over a ton in a period of three years.
Manson’s part in the elucidation of the transmission of malaria by mosquitoes took place some years later. In 1890, under financial pressure caused by the depreciation of the Chinese dollar, he set up practice in London and was appointed a physician to the Seamen’s Hospital, where he had access to many cases of tropical disease.
Manson played a significant part in the foundation of the College of Medicine at Hong Kong (later to form the basis of the University of Hong Kong) and became the first dean.
A Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898), Manson's principal work, is now in its seventeenth edition and has become a classic textbook of tropical medicine. He taught continually at the London School of Tropical Medicine and its nearby hospital until his retirement in 1914.
After his retirement he spent most of his time fishing in Ireland, interspersed with visits to Ceylon, Rhodesia, and South Africa. The last of his frequent visits to the London School took place only two weeks before his death at the age of seventy-seven.
Patrick Manson was born in a presbyterian family and at least in childhood paid much attention to Christianity showing excellent memory for memorizing church sermons at the age of 5 years.
Politics
At the end of 1870 Patrick Manson unwittingly became involved in the political struggle between China and Japan, to escape from which, on the advice of the British consul, he left Formosa early in 1871 and settled at Amoy on the mainland of China.
Views
Manson spent much of his leave from colonies to London in 1874 searching the libraries for literature on elephantiasis, in the course of which, on 25 March 1875, while working in the British Museum, he came across the work of Timothy Lewis, a surgeon in the Indian Army Medical Service, on Filaria sanguinis hominis (F.S.H.). Lewis was convinced that F.S.H. was the immature form of a much larger adult worm, which he eventually discovered in 1877, some nine months after its discovery by Thomas Lane Bancroft in Australia. He also believed that the microfilariae or the adult worms were the causative agents of disease, although nothing was known of the method of transmission. Manson pondered long on these discoveries of Lewis, and from them, he formulated his theory of mosquito transmission. So great was his interest that upon his return to Amoy he devoted all his spare time to investigating the correctness of his theory.
To this end, Manson enlisted the assistance of two medical students to examine blood for the presence of F.S.H. One of the students could work only at night, and Manson noticed that a significantly higher proportion of positives was obtained by this “night observer” than by the day worker. From this observation, he stumbled upon the hitherto unsuspected phenomenon of microfilarial periodicity. By training two men whose blood contained microfilariae to examine each other every three hours for six weeks, he was able conclusively to demonstrate that microfilariae were present in the blood in larger numbers at night than during the day. (The resulting graphs of microfilarial numbers are now preserved in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.) He also demonstrated that the microfilariae were surrounded by a sheath, from which they could escape when the blood was cooled in ice. This observation led him to postulate that F.S.H. was an embryo worm that could continue its development outside the human body in the common brown mosquito of Amoy (now identified as Culex fatigans). He then persuaded his gardener, who was infected with microfilariae, to allow large numbers of mosquitoes to feed upon him; and by dissecting the fed mosquitoes he was able to trace the development of the worm through the intestine and into the thoracic musculature. In his publications of 1877 and 1878, Manson referred to the mosquitoes as “nurses.”
Manson's work, however, was greatly hampered by the absence of literature on the life cycle of mosquitoes. He mistakenly believed that mosquitoes took only a single meal of blood, with the result that most of his mosquitoes died within five days. He also erroneously believed that man became infected by ingesting the larvae in water, into which they were released when the mosquitoes laid their eggs.
Nevertheless, these early experiments provided the first proof of the obligatory involvement of an arthropod vector in the life cycle of a parasite. The almost unending list of parasites now known to require an arthropod as a necessary alternate host is the testimony of the fundamental nature of Manson’s concept. Yet, when his work on periodicity and on development in the mosquito was presented to the Linnean Society of London by the president, Spencer Cobbold, on 7 March 1878, the only recognition that it received was incredulity and ridicule.
At Seamen’s Hospital Manson carried out prolonged observations on the “exflagellation” of malaria and, in a paper published in 1894, postulated that the process was a normal part of the life cycle of the parasite in the stomach of the mosquito. In the same year he met Ronald Ross, with whom, after showing him the malaria parasite, he spent long hours discussing the mosquito-malaria theory. Largely as a result of pressure on the India Office brought to bear by Manson, Ross was dispatched to India the following year to investigate the theory. Manson’s advice was to “follow the flagellum,” and Ross soon succeeded in observing exflagellation in the stomach of the mosquito. But the problem of following the parasite into the tissues of the mosquito, of which only one species is suitable for development, proved to be a Herculean task. Throughout the months of investigation that followed, Manson maintained a continuous correspondence with Ross, much of which has now been published. In August 1897 Ross dissected a new type of mosquito (Anopheles) that had fed on a malaria patient, and in it he found pigmented round bodies on the stomach wall. The pigmented bodies were sent to Manson, who confirmed their significance. Soon afterward Ross was removed to an area where human malaria was absent, and there he applied himself to the study of Proteosoma, a malaria parasite of sparrows. From this study he was able in 1898 to describe its complete life cycle in the mosquito. The discovery was announced by Manson at a meeting of the British Medical Association in Edinburgh. Ross fully acknowledged the part played by Manson; but Manson, with characteristic modesty, disclaimed any credit save that of having “discovered” Ross. Meanwhile, in Italy, Grassi in 1898 transmitted human malaria by the bite of a mosquito and in 1901 described the complete life cycle of the parasite.
Manson was responsible not only for the concept of the mosquito-transmission theory but also for bringing the findings of Ross and Grassi to the attention of the public and thus for spreading the knowledge that eventually led to the practical control of malaria. In 1900, from a consignment of infected mosquitoes sent by Grassi to London, Manson succeeded in infecting his son and a laboratory technician by mosquito bite. In the same year, Manson sent two of his pupils, Low and Sambon, to live for three months in a highly malarious area of Italy. By the simple expedient of spending each night in a mosquito-proof hut, they remained healthy and uninfected, while their neighbors lay sick and dying of the disease. Manson was involved in the whole field of tropical medicine, as well as in the discovery of many other pathogenic parasites and in the elucidation of their life cycles, including Paragonimus westermanni, Sparganum mansoni, Schistosoma mansoni and S. japonicum, Oxyspirura mansoni, Loa loa, and Filaria perstans.
In a letter to Lancet published in 1897 Manson stressed the need for special training of doctors destined for work in the tropics. Despite the disapproval of many of his colleagues, his recommendations led to the foundation of the London School of Tropical Medicine in 1899, some six months after the opening of the world’s first tropical school in Liverpool. On many subsequent occasions, Manson pleaded for funds for “our tropical schools,” which became the models for similar institutions throughout the world.
Membership
Royal College of Physicians
,
United Kingdom
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
,
United Kingdom
Epidemiological Society of London
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Manson was a man of deep penetrative mind, original in thought, creative in imagination, careful and patient in experimentation. He was possessed of an overwhelming desire to communicate his knowledge to others, and so stimulating was his enthusiasm that wherever he went he invariably gathered about him a group of eager students.
Connections
At the end of 1874, Manson returned to Great Britain on a year’s leave, during which he was married to Henrietta Isabella Thurburn on 21 December 1875. They had three sons and one daughter, Edith Margaret Manson.