London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
The School was founded in 1899 by Patrick Manson — 'the father of tropical medicine' — with the Seamen's Hospital Society's backing, to teach colonial physicians the parasitology their Edinburgh and London degrees had omitted. Manson's insight, that insects carry disease between humans, arrived the year before mosquitoes were shown to carry malaria; the School opened just in time to be right.
Ronald Ross, who proved the mosquito hypothesis and won the Nobel Prize in 1902, taught here; the School's archive keeps his notebooks. A century later the institution is research-only and postgraduate — no undergraduates, a compact campus on Keppel Street behind a 1929 brick façade carved with the names of its patrons and, discreetly, its donors' diseases.
Field notes
- Ross's Nobel (1902) was the first awarded for work done largely in the tropics.
- The Keppel Street gates bear a golden mosquito — the School's emblem of vector biology since 1929.
- Manson's original lectures were given at the Albert Dock Seamen's Hospital, miles east.
Notable connections
In brief — from the field guide
Patrick Manson's school for the medicine of hot places — founded 1899, when the empire's doctors kept dying of what they were sent to cure. Research-only, postgraduate, and arranged around one of Bloomsbury's landmark interwar buildings.
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