Patrick Manson

Sir Patrick Manson (3 October 1844 in Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire - 9 April 1922 in London) was a British physician who made important discoveries in parasitology and was the founder of the tropical medicine field.

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He was the son of John Manson and Elizabeth née Blakie. He obtained the Bachelor of Medicine at the University of Aberdeen in 1865, his Master of Surgery in 1866, his Medical Doctorate and Doctor of Law in 1886.

Manson traveled to Formosa (Taiwan) in 1866 as a medical officer to the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, where he started a lifelong career in the research of tropical medicine. After 5 years in Formosa (Taiwan), he transferred to Amoy, and worked for another 13 years. Between 1866 and 1889 he practiced medicine in Hong Kong and in Amoy on the Chinese coast. He demonstrated that the mosquito was the host of the Filarial Wuchereria bancrofti worm, which provokes filariasis. He then suggested that the agent that causes malaria was also spread by a mosquito. This discovery was one of the most important of medical breakthroughs of the time. This hypothesis was proved by Sir Ronald Ross in 1898, who later won the Nobel Prize in 1902 for this discovery. He also demonstrated a new species of Schistosomiasis (Bilharzia) known as Schistosomiasis mansoni. He also help establish a Dairy Farm in Pok Fu Lam in 1885 and the company Dairy Farm.

Manson married in 1876 to Henrietta Isabella Thurbun, with whom he had three sons and one daughter. He was the founder of the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, where Sun Yat-sen was one of his first pupils. In 1911 this became the University of Hong Kong. He returned to London in 1890 and participated at the founding in 1899 and later taught at the School of Tropical Medicine at the Albert Dock Seamen's Hospital, today the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1900, knighted in 1903 and in the following year awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of Oxford.

Publications

• Tropical Diseases : a Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898);
• Lectures on Tropical Diseases (1905);
• Diet in the Diseases of Hot Climates (1908), with Charles Wilberforce Daniels (1862-1927).