Sir Ronald Ross, 1857-1932

Sir Ronald Ross was born in India in 1857. He completed his medical studies in London in 1881 and returned to India as a surgeon in the Indian Medical Service. Ross began his study of malaria in 1892 and between 1897 and 1898 he verified the causal link between the life cycle of the mosquito and malaria. In 1899, he joined the staff of the recently established Liverpool School of Tropical Diseases and three years later received the Nobel Prize for medicine. He was knighted in 1910. Ross left Liverpool for London and private practice in 1912 and in 1925 he witnessed the opening of the Ross Institute as a research establishment for the study of tropical diseases. In addition to his medical work, Ross was also an accomplished novelist, poet and mathematician and these interests are reflected in the collection, along with papers demonstrating his professional career. He died in 1932 after a long illness.

The Ross Collection represents approximately half of the existing Ross papers. The other papers, which are similar both in quantity and contents, are deposited at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and are known as the Ross Archive.

For an obituary of Sir Ronald Ross, see the British Medical Journal, 1932 (Volume 2).