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Patrick Manson (1844–1922) and the Transmission of Filariasis^*

Led by the eminent Raphael Blanchard, the assemblage in the Tropical Section of the 1913 International Congress of Medicine in London proclaimed Sir Patrick Manson the "Father of Tropical Medicine." Manson (Fig. 1), then about 70 and just retired, had enjoyed full careers as physician, teacher, and researcher in China and in England, and as founder of the Hongkong Medical School, the London School of Tropical Medicine, later the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Society of Tropical Medicine, later the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Pride of place among Manson's many researches must go to his epochal discovery that a blood-sucking arthropod, a mosquito in this case, serves as the mandatory intermediary for a human parasite. He realized this powerful insight in 1877, not long after Pasteur's major works; thus 1977 marks the centennial of Manson's discovery which signalled the birth of tropical medicine and of medical entomology.

^* Text adapted from a paper presented at The Symposium on The History of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, 3 November 1976, as part of the joint meeting in Philadelphia of The American and Royal Societies of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

This research was supported in part by grants from the Milton Fund of Harvard University, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the National Library of Medicine (LM 02821), and by a Research Career Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, USPHS.