"Wonders unconceived": reflections on the birth of medical entomology

Abstract

Prior to Patrick Manson's discovery in 1877 that the mosquito Culex fatigans was the intermediate host of filariasis, the association of insects with disease and the nature of disease transmission was almost entirely speculation. Manson's work was incomplete, however, because it showed the manner in which the mosquito acquired the infection from humans, but failed to show the way in which the mosquito passed the infection to humans. That pathogens were transmitted by the bite of an infected female mosquito was later proven experimentally with bird malaria by Manson's protégé, Ronald Ross. In 1898 Ross demonstrated that the infective stage of the malarial parasite was injected into the host when the mosquito released saliva into the wound prior to injesting blood. Insects were suspected as carriers of disease for centuries, yet it was not until the late 1870s that the uncritical acceptance of folk beliefs was supplanted by research-based scientific medicine. Why did it take so long? The answer lies in the fact that early medicine itself was imprecise and could not have pursued the subject with any hope of useful results until the last quarter of the 19th century. A better understanding of the nature of the disease process (germ theory of disease) and improved technology (microscopes and oil-immersion lenses with greater resolving power, and synthetic tissue stains) were indispensable for revealing the nexus between those partners in crime: insects and parasites.