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A Feverish Imagination

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A Feverish Imagination BOOKS & ARTS NATURE|Vol 451|28 February 2008 A feverish imagination Poems, plays and novels punctuated the life of Ronald Ross. Martin Kemp despair. Posted in Secunderabad, India, he had There was more to Ronald Ross (1857–1932) himself contracted malaria in April 1897. The than his Nobel Prize for discovering the role monsoon was slow to break. The heat became of the Anopheles mosquito in the transmission stifling and the insects intolerable. Working in of malaria. Ross’s Memoirs paint a picture of isolation with feverish intensity, he painstak- a driven man, intolerant of petty-minded ingly dissected mosquitoes fed on his malaria- administrators, whose inner life was coloured infected patients. His research was running by a vivid literary and artistic imagination. into a dead end: “failure followed failure”. He Ross’ father had thwarted his initial ambi- drafted impassioned lines for his running tions to become an artist. Subsequently, a poetic composition In Exile: series of deeply felt poems, plays and novels punctuated his working life as a doctor special- What ails the solitude? izing in tropical medicine. An admirer of the Is this the Judgement Day? full-blooded romanticism of Lord Byron and The sky is as red as blood MEDICINE & TROPICAL SCHOOL OF HYGIENE LONDON Alfred Lord Tennyson, and a friend of John The very Rocks decay. I know this little thing Masefield (the later poet laureate), Ross was A myriad of men will save. also drawn at an early age to Johann Wolfgang Then, the sudden breakthrough. He O Death. Where is thy sting? von Goethe’s Faust, as a skilled drawing in his dissected mosquito no. 38 without much expec- Thy victory, O Grave. teenage sketchbook from 1872 testifies. tation that it would be different. He observed Much of the sketchbook is occupied by “some large cells with pigment” in its stomach, Faust was driven by Mephistopheles, Ross by accomplished landscape drawings and water- no less than nine of them. The note (pictured) God. They were well matched in the intensity colours made on the Isle of Wight, perhaps with is triple underlined. Below some characteristi- of their quests. By September, Ross had drafted the assistance of a camera lucida. An annota- cally rapid graphic notations of the kind that his urgent official report from India. His regu- tion in the sketchbook records the source of punctuate his notes and letters, he records the lar correspondent and fellow researcher Patrick Ross’s drawing of Faust as Moritz Retzsch’s tell-tale pigments. “The outline of the cells is Manson safeguarded Ross’s priority claim by 27 illustrations of Goethe’s tragedy, first pub- generally thick, but in the smaller ones some- ensuring that his friend’s discovery was pre- lished in Britain in 1820. However, this is true times delicate.” These were the malaria cells in sented forthwith to the British Medical Asso- only in a generic sense, because Ross’s draw- the mosquito’s stomach for which he had been ciation. Two years later Ross was installed in ing does not correspond directly to any of the desperately searching.The tone of In Exile the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Retzsch prints but seems to be his own imagi- transforms: The Nobel prize followed in 1902, in the face native variation on the theme. Faust sits brood- of formidable competition from Ivan Pavlov, ing in a lansdcape, while an owl, a symbol of This day designing God and a knighthood in 1911. Ross was not simply night, hovers nearby. The demeanour of Faust Hath put into my hand a a doctor who wrote poetry; his science and art manifests the devilish melancholy that tradi- Wondrous thing. And God manifest the imaginative fire that governed his tionally afflicts those who strive towards the Be praised. At his command, creative life in all its aspects. ■ ultimate and the unattainable. Martin Kemp is research professor in the history Ross’s Memoirs, in the period leading up I have found thy secret deeds of art at the University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 to his discovery, oscillate between hope and Oh million-murdering Death. 1PT, UK. Ronald Ross’s drawing of Goethe’s Faust LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE & TROPICAL MEDICINE & TROPICAL SCHOOL OF HYGIENE LONDON 1056.
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