The beast in the mosquito: the correspondence of Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson

Edited by W.F. Bynum and C. Overy Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1998. £33 (PB), ISBN 90 420 0721 4 The first impression of the correspondence of Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson is that both men wrote excellent letters. There are 250 letters and telegrams in this collection and, although Ross quoted from them at length in his Memoirs, the bulk has never been published. They not only include those in the Ross Archives at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the handful at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Glasgow, but also three unknown ones remaining in the possession of the Manson-Bahr family. Ross presents himself as excitable, impetuous, tenacious and, towards the end, as a bad enemy, reluctant to let any grudge die. Manson is more relaxed but equally tenacious. The introduction gives a biographical sketch of both men and their association. The letters are copiously annotated and there is a biographical index to those people most frequently mentioned. Notable omissions are the Indian princes mentioned in the text. While biographies of Ross's Indian assistants and patients, whose names are probably incomplete and phonetically spelled, are out of the question, it should not have been impossible to give a biographical sketch of someone as prominent as the Maharajah of Patiala. There are some misprints: for example it is most unlikely that either Ross or Manson would refer to the Colonial Office without giving it initial capital letters or that Ross would have put an accent on the ‘u’ in Sigur Ghat in one letter and not in another. There are two glaring errors. Ross himself had said in his Memoirs that his elder son was born in Surbiton, Surrey, when the family were on home leave, and not, as the editors say, in India, and that he was awarded the CB in 1902 and not the CBE. The Order of the British Empire was instituted in 1917. It is good to see the sketches in the letters inserted correctly in the text but there are some infelicities in the layout of the full page illustrations. It is most appropriate that these important letters were published in sequence and in toto for the first time during the centennial year of Ross's unravelling the mosquito/malaria relationship. Mary Gibson