Scientific Thought, Poetic Thought
Ross made his key discovery on 20th and 21st of August 1897 and wrote his poem marking the discovery on the evening of the 21st .
A few days later he re-drafted the poem into the form in which it is now known.
Here is how he describes the sequence of events immediately following his key observation of the tell-tale pigmented cells in the mosquito's stomach.
"I made rough drawings of the nine of the cells on page 107 of my notebook, scribbled my notes, sealed my specimen, went home to tea and slept solidly for an hour... I wrote that evening to my wife " I have seen something very suspicious in my mosquitoes today and hope it may lead to something" Then I added "Lately I have been putting together those rhymes I used to make on "Exile"..." Bt then another consideration struck me. If these cells were the parasites they should grow in size n the last remaining mosquito during the night: and I spent that night in an agony lest my sole surviving friend should perish and go bad before morning!
Next day I went to hospital intensely excited. The last survivor of the batch fed on the 16th Mosquito 39, was alive...I slew and dissected it with a shaking hand. There were the cells again, twenty-one of them as before, only now much larger! Mosquito 38.. was killed...on the 20th. This one ws killed on the 21st, the fifth day after feeding, and the cells had grown during the extra day. The cells were therefore parasites, and, as they contained the characteristic malarial pigment, were almost certainly the malaria parasites growing in the mosquito's tissues.
The thing was really done....
That evening I wrote to my wife; "I have seen something very promising indeed in my new mosquitoes" and I scribbled the following unfinished verses in one of my ' In Exile' notebooks in pencil:
This day designing God
Hath put into my hand
A wondrous thing . And God
Be praised. At his command,
I have found thy sceret deeds
Oh million-murdering Death.
I know that this little thing
A million men will save -
Oh death where is thy sting?
Thy victory oh grave?"
On the 22nd I wrote to my wife, after mentioning the poem again "I really think I have done the mosquito theory at (last), having found something in mosquitoes fed on malaria patients exactly like the malaria parasite." Then, or a few days later, I wrote the amended verses on a separate slip of paper:
This day relenting God
Has placed within my hand
A wondrous thing and God
Be praised. At his command
Seeking his secret deeds
With tears and toiling breath
I find thy cunning seeds
O million-murdering death.
I know this little thing
A myriad men will save.
O death, where is thy sting,
Thy victory o grave?
About the same time the two subsequent sonnetelles of 'In Exile' were added. "
Ross wrote this Memoir over a quarter of a century after the events he describes, and the closely linked nature of the process of writing verses and of pursuing his experiments is clearly fixed in his mind.
In his book Ronald Ross, Discoverer and Creator , R.L. Megroz notes
"It is true that the imagination is used constructively in both art and science, and, granting this one can agree with the statement that the scientific discoverer is an artist; he is of the same type. What is of the same type is the original mind..."
He goes on to say of Ross
""When he had demonstrated the presence of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes, the discovery had to find poetic expression before his ambivalent intellect could fully realise itself"
Whereas the links between artistic and scientific creative processes are now much more widely considered and investigated, the Mosquito Day stanzas remain quite a rare example of the linkage between a specific act of discovery and the writing of verses commemorating that discovery by the discoverer himself, where the discoverer clearly considers, both at the time and in retrospect, that the two acts belong together.
Moreover, as the poet John Masefield notes in his commemorative lecture on Mosquito Day at the Ross Institute in 1948, the entire process of writing In Exile, of which the Mosquito Day stanzas form a culminating part, was an integral part of Ross's long-drawn out series of experiments in search of his proof.
"In Exile...is one poem made up of a number of little poems, most of them three stanzas long, in quatrains of six-syllable lines. These, as he tells us, were written in the evenings after the day's researches: as summaries, shall we say, of his achievements and hopes, as he toiled on, in the hot weather examining countless mosquitoes, by methods invented by himself, at a microscope with screws so rusted with sweat that he could only focus with difficulty. In Exile tells the story of the search as Ross saw it: the effort of one unaided, undaunted intellect, in a vast sub-continent... Spiritually you are called to join him, to share a great quest pursued under terrible conditions in the nightmare of an Indian summer before the rains break..."
In his documentation in poetry of his malaria research, there is a clear sense that Ross is placing himself within a narrative which defines his struggle as a heroic, symbolic and vital act. The poetry reflects moods, fears, agonies and how he navigates a way through them rather than specifics.
Ross has sought "cunning seeds' with "tears and toiling breath". In his poem Indian Fevers he places himself squarely in the heart of the agonizing struggle
"I pace and pace, and think and think, and take
The fevered hands and note down all I see,
That some dim distant light may haply break.
The painful faces ask "Can we not cure?
We answer, "No; not yet; we seek the laws.'
O God reveal through all this thing obscure
The unseen small but million-murdering cause."
In describing more technical aspects of his research work, Ross also does what many scientific researchers must do to help steer themselves on through the tedium of close, repetitive search-work. He creates scenarios to describe his search, to himself and others, and in Ross's case these scenarios are part of an energized, heroic narrative in which the would-be hero is himself, at the mercy of Fate, circumstance and all manner of puzzling difficulties.
Here is his description of the moment of discovery on Mosquito Day, when he dissects his last remaining mosquito.
"The dissection was excellent, and I went carefully through the tissues now so familiar to me, searching every micron with the same passion and care as one would search some vast ruined palace for a little hidden treasure. Nothing. No, these new mosquitoes were going to be a failure; there was something wrong with the theory. But the stomach tissue still remained to be examined.
Lying there, empty and flaccid, before me on the glass slide, a great white expanse of cells like a large courtyard of flagstones, each one of which must be scrutinised. - half an hour's labour at least. I was tired, and what was the use? I must have examined the stomachs of a thousand mosquitoes by this time. But the Angel of Fate fortunately laid his hand on my head; and I had scarcely commenced the search again when I see a clear and almost perfectly circular outline before me of about twelve microns in diameter. The outline was much too sharp, the cell too small to be an ordinary stomach-cell of a mosquito. I look a little further. Here was another, and another exactly similar cell.
The afternoon was very hot and overcast; and I remember opening the diaphragm of the sub-stage condenser of the microscope to admit more light and then changing the focus. In each of these cells there was a cluster of small granules, black as jet and exactly like the black pigment of the Plasmodium crescents. I laughed and shouted... "
In another instance. In a letter to Manson in 1895 he describes spending eight hours one day observing flagella with one stint of three hours observing "a beauty" in a drop of blood without taking his eye from the microscope.
"He riggles (sic) around for twenty minutes like a trypanosoma , so that I could hardly follow him. Then he brought up against a phagocyte and remained so long that I thought the phagocyte had got hold of him. Not a bit; he was not killed or sucked in; but kept poking him in the ribs in different parts of the body. I was astonished; and so, apparently was the phagocyte. He kept at this for about a quarter of an hour, and then went away across two fields and went straight at another phagocyte! He pushed into this in several places with one end for a long time; and the phagocyte seemed to rear up and try to get around him, but could not. At last the phagocyte seemed to give up and flattened itself against an air bubble, the flagellum still poking away at him. After fifty minutes the beast seemed to be getting tired, when a very curious thing happened; a third phagocyte came at him with mouth open straight across the filed, but had no sooner got near him when the flagellum left his fallen foe and attacked the new one, holding on and shaking like a snake on a dog. In one minute the third phagocyte turned sharp round and ran off howling!!! - I assure you. I won't swear I heard him howling, but I saw him howling. He went right across a whole filed, the flagellum holding on to his tail... This continued for five minutes, the poor phagocyte literally legging it, after which the flagellum left him and went away."
His description of the day's work goes on to conclude
"The spectacle of the first mosquito was really wonderful. I shall dream of it. Good night. So was the fight between the flagellum and three phagocytes. I shall write a novel on it in the style of the Three Musketeers."
References
Memoirs, with a full account of the Great Malaria Problem and its Solution Colonel Sir Ronald Ross 1923
Ronald Ross, Discoverer and Creator (1931), R.L. Megroz
www.firstscience.com/site/poems.asp
Christine Watkins Dec 2007
A few days later he re-drafted the poem into the form in which it is now known.
Here is how he describes the sequence of events immediately following his key observation of the tell-tale pigmented cells in the mosquito's stomach.
"I made rough drawings of the nine of the cells on page 107 of my notebook, scribbled my notes, sealed my specimen, went home to tea and slept solidly for an hour... I wrote that evening to my wife " I have seen something very suspicious in my mosquitoes today and hope it may lead to something" Then I added "Lately I have been putting together those rhymes I used to make on "Exile"..." Bt then another consideration struck me. If these cells were the parasites they should grow in size n the last remaining mosquito during the night: and I spent that night in an agony lest my sole surviving friend should perish and go bad before morning!
Next day I went to hospital intensely excited. The last survivor of the batch fed on the 16th Mosquito 39, was alive...I slew and dissected it with a shaking hand. There were the cells again, twenty-one of them as before, only now much larger! Mosquito 38.. was killed...on the 20th. This one ws killed on the 21st, the fifth day after feeding, and the cells had grown during the extra day. The cells were therefore parasites, and, as they contained the characteristic malarial pigment, were almost certainly the malaria parasites growing in the mosquito's tissues.
The thing was really done....
That evening I wrote to my wife; "I have seen something very promising indeed in my new mosquitoes" and I scribbled the following unfinished verses in one of my ' In Exile' notebooks in pencil:
This day designing God
Hath put into my hand
A wondrous thing . And God
Be praised. At his command,
I have found thy sceret deeds
Oh million-murdering Death.
I know that this little thing
A million men will save -
Oh death where is thy sting?
Thy victory oh grave?"
On the 22nd I wrote to my wife, after mentioning the poem again "I really think I have done the mosquito theory at (last), having found something in mosquitoes fed on malaria patients exactly like the malaria parasite." Then, or a few days later, I wrote the amended verses on a separate slip of paper:
This day relenting God
Has placed within my hand
A wondrous thing and God
Be praised. At his command
Seeking his secret deeds
With tears and toiling breath
I find thy cunning seeds
O million-murdering death.
I know this little thing
A myriad men will save.
O death, where is thy sting,
Thy victory o grave?
About the same time the two subsequent sonnetelles of 'In Exile' were added. "
Ross wrote this Memoir over a quarter of a century after the events he describes, and the closely linked nature of the process of writing verses and of pursuing his experiments is clearly fixed in his mind.
In his book Ronald Ross, Discoverer and Creator , R.L. Megroz notes
"It is true that the imagination is used constructively in both art and science, and, granting this one can agree with the statement that the scientific discoverer is an artist; he is of the same type. What is of the same type is the original mind..."
He goes on to say of Ross
""When he had demonstrated the presence of the malaria parasite in mosquitoes, the discovery had to find poetic expression before his ambivalent intellect could fully realise itself"
Whereas the links between artistic and scientific creative processes are now much more widely considered and investigated, the Mosquito Day stanzas remain quite a rare example of the linkage between a specific act of discovery and the writing of verses commemorating that discovery by the discoverer himself, where the discoverer clearly considers, both at the time and in retrospect, that the two acts belong together.
Moreover, as the poet John Masefield notes in his commemorative lecture on Mosquito Day at the Ross Institute in 1948, the entire process of writing In Exile, of which the Mosquito Day stanzas form a culminating part, was an integral part of Ross's long-drawn out series of experiments in search of his proof.
"In Exile...is one poem made up of a number of little poems, most of them three stanzas long, in quatrains of six-syllable lines. These, as he tells us, were written in the evenings after the day's researches: as summaries, shall we say, of his achievements and hopes, as he toiled on, in the hot weather examining countless mosquitoes, by methods invented by himself, at a microscope with screws so rusted with sweat that he could only focus with difficulty. In Exile tells the story of the search as Ross saw it: the effort of one unaided, undaunted intellect, in a vast sub-continent... Spiritually you are called to join him, to share a great quest pursued under terrible conditions in the nightmare of an Indian summer before the rains break..."
In his documentation in poetry of his malaria research, there is a clear sense that Ross is placing himself within a narrative which defines his struggle as a heroic, symbolic and vital act. The poetry reflects moods, fears, agonies and how he navigates a way through them rather than specifics.
Ross has sought "cunning seeds' with "tears and toiling breath". In his poem Indian Fevers he places himself squarely in the heart of the agonizing struggle
"I pace and pace, and think and think, and take
The fevered hands and note down all I see,
That some dim distant light may haply break.
The painful faces ask "Can we not cure?
We answer, "No; not yet; we seek the laws.'
O God reveal through all this thing obscure
The unseen small but million-murdering cause."
In describing more technical aspects of his research work, Ross also does what many scientific researchers must do to help steer themselves on through the tedium of close, repetitive search-work. He creates scenarios to describe his search, to himself and others, and in Ross's case these scenarios are part of an energized, heroic narrative in which the would-be hero is himself, at the mercy of Fate, circumstance and all manner of puzzling difficulties.
Here is his description of the moment of discovery on Mosquito Day, when he dissects his last remaining mosquito.
"The dissection was excellent, and I went carefully through the tissues now so familiar to me, searching every micron with the same passion and care as one would search some vast ruined palace for a little hidden treasure. Nothing. No, these new mosquitoes were going to be a failure; there was something wrong with the theory. But the stomach tissue still remained to be examined.
Lying there, empty and flaccid, before me on the glass slide, a great white expanse of cells like a large courtyard of flagstones, each one of which must be scrutinised. - half an hour's labour at least. I was tired, and what was the use? I must have examined the stomachs of a thousand mosquitoes by this time. But the Angel of Fate fortunately laid his hand on my head; and I had scarcely commenced the search again when I see a clear and almost perfectly circular outline before me of about twelve microns in diameter. The outline was much too sharp, the cell too small to be an ordinary stomach-cell of a mosquito. I look a little further. Here was another, and another exactly similar cell.
The afternoon was very hot and overcast; and I remember opening the diaphragm of the sub-stage condenser of the microscope to admit more light and then changing the focus. In each of these cells there was a cluster of small granules, black as jet and exactly like the black pigment of the Plasmodium crescents. I laughed and shouted... "
In another instance. In a letter to Manson in 1895 he describes spending eight hours one day observing flagella with one stint of three hours observing "a beauty" in a drop of blood without taking his eye from the microscope.
"He riggles (sic) around for twenty minutes like a trypanosoma , so that I could hardly follow him. Then he brought up against a phagocyte and remained so long that I thought the phagocyte had got hold of him. Not a bit; he was not killed or sucked in; but kept poking him in the ribs in different parts of the body. I was astonished; and so, apparently was the phagocyte. He kept at this for about a quarter of an hour, and then went away across two fields and went straight at another phagocyte! He pushed into this in several places with one end for a long time; and the phagocyte seemed to rear up and try to get around him, but could not. At last the phagocyte seemed to give up and flattened itself against an air bubble, the flagellum still poking away at him. After fifty minutes the beast seemed to be getting tired, when a very curious thing happened; a third phagocyte came at him with mouth open straight across the filed, but had no sooner got near him when the flagellum left his fallen foe and attacked the new one, holding on and shaking like a snake on a dog. In one minute the third phagocyte turned sharp round and ran off howling!!! - I assure you. I won't swear I heard him howling, but I saw him howling. He went right across a whole filed, the flagellum holding on to his tail... This continued for five minutes, the poor phagocyte literally legging it, after which the flagellum left him and went away."
His description of the day's work goes on to conclude
"The spectacle of the first mosquito was really wonderful. I shall dream of it. Good night. So was the fight between the flagellum and three phagocytes. I shall write a novel on it in the style of the Three Musketeers."
References
Memoirs, with a full account of the Great Malaria Problem and its Solution Colonel Sir Ronald Ross 1923
Ronald Ross, Discoverer and Creator (1931), R.L. Megroz
www.firstscience.com/site/poems.asp
Christine Watkins Dec 2007
