Ronald Ross

Ronald Ross was a British doctor who spent 25 years in the Indian Medical Service, where in 1897 he spotted the malarial parasite inside a mosquito's gut — the proof that mosquitoes transmit the disease. The Nobel came in 1902. After leaving India he taught at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine for a decade, then in 1926 became Director-in-Chief of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases, founded in his name. He stayed until his death in 1932. Outside medicine he wrote poems and novels, composed songs, painted, and dabbled in mathematics — a side catalogue that never quite esc…