138 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY
his associates^ Carroll, Lazear and Agramontey in 1900. Prior to Finlay however. Sir Patrick Manson had, in 1879, demonstrated that the mos- quito transmits the disease produced by the parasite FUaria. In 1883, Dr. A. F. A. King, an English physician residing in Washington, D. C, gave nineteen cogent reasons why mosquitoes should transmit malarial fever and suggested screening the city from the marshy Potomac flats. In 1884, Carl Oerhardt demonstrated that malarial fever can be trans- mitted from the sick to the healthy by inoculation of the blood of the former,^ in other words, as Boss says, '* that the disease is not due to any gaseous emanation from the marshes, but is a true infection by some living virus/^ This laboratory demonstration of Gkrhardf s may be said to have abolished the Miasm Theory of malarial fever. In 1885-6, CamUlo Oolgi,^ at Pavia, showed that the Laveran parasites reproduce by formation of spores, and that the paroxysm of fever begins, as Basori had surmised, just when the spores are liberated. That the parasites of the different forms of intermittent fever are different from each other and that similar parasites are found in birds was speedily shown by Marchiafava, Celli, Orassi and other Italian observers. In 1884, Laveran, and, about the same time, Koch, suggested that mosquitoes, aa abounding in marshy places, may play the same part in malarial fever which Manson had shown them to play in filariasis. In 1894, Manson, in drawing a parallel between the malarial organism and PUaria noo- tuma, suggested that '^ the mosquito having been shown to be the agent by which the Filaria is removed from the human blood vessels, this, or a similar suctorial insect must be the agent which removes from the human blood vessels those forms of the malaria organism which are destined to continue the existence of this organism outside the body. It must, therefore, be in this or in a similar suctorial insect or insects that the first stages of the extra-corporeal life of a malarial organism are passed.^^* It is just at this point that the work of Bonald Boss looms large in importance.
Lieut.-Col. Sir Bonald Boss, K.C.B., F.B.S., the son of General Sir C. C. G. Boss, an eminent English soldier, was born on May 13, 1857, received his medical education at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, graduated in 1879, and entered the Indian Medical Service in 1881. He began to study malarial fevers in India in 1889. Doubting the truth of Laveran's discovery, he at first, after the fashion of Broussais, regarded the infection as the result of intestinal auto-intoxication. Being in London in 1894, he became acquainted with Manson's mosquito theory and upon returning to India the next year, undertook to verify
«C. Gerhardt, "Ueber Intermittensimpfimgen, " Ztschr. /. X^m. Med^, BerL, 1883-4, VH., 37^^77.
SO. Golgi, Bull' infezione malarica," AreK per le so. med,, Torino, 1886, X., 109-135.
« Manson, Brit. Med. Jour., Lond., 1894, II., 1306.
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