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JOSEPHJONES: IDIOSYNCRATIC STUDENT OF MALARIA ELI CHERNIN* Millenia of ignorance about the genesis of malaria ended when Laveran in 1880 recognized the causal parasites in human blood and Ross in 1897 uncovered their transmission by mosquitoes. Conventional histories of malaria focus on these ultimate heroes and so fulfill what might be called Jarcho's Principle—that for parasitology and its congeners, "... history is a record of winners, not of losers" [I]. A measure of attention might well be accorded, the principle suggests, to some lesser workers whose useful contributions may have escaped critical attention. One such figure is Joseph Jones, who, it now appears, was America's most industrious, certainly its most published, and arguably its most original malaria researcher and teacher for 3 decades beginning in the 1850s. Many of Jones's medical publications have been reviewed [2—7], but the absence of any systematic evaluation of his malariologic inquiries prompted the present study. Background Before Laveran's discovery, some researchers doubtless saw the malarial organisms but described them only as pigmented "globules" or "hyaline bodies" and attached no etiologic significance to them. Laveran not only saw the peculiar bodies in blood but recognized them as being living organisms and asserted that they probably caused malaria. The microscopic black-brown pigment granules—known to pathologists The author thanks Mark D. Altschule, M.D., and Mr. Richard J. Wolfe, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, for helpful discussions, and Saul Jarcho, M.D., for several literature citations. Supported in part by a Research Career Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, U.S. Public Health Service. *Department of Tropical Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health, 665 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115.© 1986 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1-5982/86/2902-047 1$0 1 .00 260 I Eli Chemin ¦ JosephJones, Student ofMalaria since 1847 and characteristically present in the blood and tissues of malarial victims—helped guide Laveran to the protozoan parasites that proved to be responsible for both the pigment and the disease. The malarial pigment, in the vivid words of Ronald Ross [8], was "... merely the excrementitious matter produced by the parasites from the substance of the red cells, and contained within their bodies, or released into the tissues of the host." This description will serve for present purposes, although the metabolic breakdown of hemoglobin by the malarial parasites is far more complex than Ross had reason to know [9]. Laveran's first reports of the parasite were met skeptically by Koch, Osier, Sternberg, and others, but by 1890 most workers had acknowledged that "There had been observed small, hyaline, amoeboid, intracellular parasites, which grew gradually, developing within themselves fine, actively motile pigment granules; these bodies eventually generally filled up the entire [red] corpuscle, decolorizing and perhaps destroying it" [10]. The discoveries of Laveran and of Ross held out the first promise of understanding and thus controlling or preventing malaria at a time when relief from the disease was sorely wanted—and not only in the tropics, for malaria was, until the 1950s, a serious problem over much of the United States, especially in the South of Joseph Jones. JosephJones Jones was born in Georgia in 1833, graduated at Princeton, and trained in medicine and research under Joseph Leidy and Samuel Jackson at the University of Pennsylvania [5]. He held professorships at several medical schools in the South before and after the Civil War, and as a surgeon (major) during the conflict he undertook special medical investigations for Samuel P. Moore, the Confederate surgeon general. In 1868 he became professor of chemistry and clinical medicine at the University of Louisiana (later the Tulane University Medical School), and he remained in New Orleans until his death in 1896. Jones served in many public, private, and scholarly capacities representing diverse fields, and he was also the paternal grandfather of the late Stanhope Bayne-Jones, M.D., an eminent physician of our generation. Jones was a prolific author whose writings are, however, insufferably long-winded, repetitious, and burdened with extraneous discourse. These morbid shortcomings were already evident in the mid-1850s when his maiden manuscript gained him the editorial ire...

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