Elizabeth Manson-Bahr traces her great-grandfather’s discovery of the causes of malaria and finds a story of doctors, merchants and diplomats who travelled the world.
A paperback with 264 pages and 46 photographs including 3 in colour, published by Troubador.
The Great Mosquito Hunt
and Other Adventures
Sir Patrick Manson, known as Mosquito Manson, was the first scientist to prove that insects were vectors of disease, which led to the detection of the malarial parasite. He founded the Chinese Medical School in Hong Kong and the London School of Tropical Medicine. Among his pupils was Sun-Yat-sen, the first President of Modern China.
Tracing the journey of a family through history, The Great Mosquito Hunt is also the story of plagues and pandemics, of Scottish and German merchants who made their fortunes in Egypt and Russia. It is the story of the rescued slave, Selim Aga, who became secretary to Sir Richard Burton, the explorer. The author’s mother, orphaned by the Spanish Flu, joined the FANYS and married Clinton, the third in the family line of tropical medicine. The chapters are interspersed by the author’s own childhood memories of growing up in Fiji and Kenya.
Elizabeth explains: I set out to write a family history with wide appeal and a well-researched family background. My own childhood in Kenya and Fiji during the last days of Empire was the germ but that in itself wasn’t enough to interest general readers. When I researched the rest of the family and the range of countries in which they lived, I found more than I bargained for!
The Author
Elizabeth has worked as a commercial artist and lives in Oxford. She is the author of a novel about the Aztecs ‘Children of the Sun” published in 2009.