The Prevention of Malaria

8vo; original burgundy cloth, with margins of boards ruled in blind, and lettered in gilt on spine and upper cover; pp. xx + 669 + (i) + (vii); several plates, incl. folding. Top fore-corner of upper board a bit bumped; very light foxing to endpapers and outer leaves; blind-stamp \"With Mr. Murray\'s Compliments\" to title page. Very good condition. A surprisingly scarce work, \'The Prevention of Malaria\', the magnum opus of Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932), represents one of the greatest triumphs in Man\'s war on disease. Awarded the second Nobel Physiology or Medicine laureateship in 1902, Ronald Ross had established conclusively by 1898 that mosquitos of the genus Anopheles are responsible for the propagation and transmission of malaria. Encouraged throughout by Patrick Manson, the doyen of researchers on tropical medicine, who had postulated the connection between mosquitos and malarial fever, Ross differed from his mentor in his belief that the infected insects in fact injected the Plasmodium parasite into the human bloodstream through their bites. Ross was able to establish through painstaking experimentation that transmission was as he had suspected, and that it was exclusively Anophelene mosquitos that conveyed the disease from human to human. He had achieved his successes under the most trying circumstances, without the support of his superiors in the Indian Medical Service, but always with Manson\'s enthusiastic help. The Manson-Ross correspondence now has pride of place in the library of the Ross Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Ross was also a gifted mathematician, and pioneer in the application of mathematics to the study of epidemiology. He considered his researches in this field to be his most important contribution to science. Besides his initial work in India, Ronald Ross led expeditions to West Africa and various other parts of the world with a view to applying measures for the control and possible eradication of malaria. His recommendations for public health have renewed resonance as the world faces a resurgence of malaria, and previously effective drugs now have little value in malarious areas.