Friday 23 April 2010

Minor Estates work in the Library 24th/25th April.

Minor Estates work will take place in the Library this coming weekend (24th/25th April). There will be some noise disruption, but this will be kept to an absolute minimum, and the Library will remain open as usual.

Monday 19 April 2010

National Library for Public Health launches Annual Evidence Update on childhood obesity from 19 April 2010

The National Library for Public Health has launched the 2010 Annual Evidence Update on childhood obesity today, focusing on childhood obesity surveillance and preventative public health interventions. The Evidence Update includes a number of key policy documents and guest editorials written by experts, which provide a snapshot summary of preventative interventions for childhood obesity and international surveillance activities. Find out more at http://www.library.nhs.uk/publichealth/ or http://bit.ly/d85AwF.

Annual Evidence Updates aim to compile the best evidence on a specific topic published in the last 12 months.

Wednesday 7 April 2010

Collection of the month: Ross notebook


To mark World Malaria Day 2010 and the LSHTM Malaria Centre event held at the School on 23rd April, we have chosen an item which documents one of greatest discoveries in tropical medicine and advanced our knowledge of malaria.

This notebook, which belonged to Ronald Ross, was kept during the years 1895-1897 whilst he was working in India. The page we have displayed here shows the working notes made by Ross on 20th August 1897 in his office in Secunderabad. During the dissection of the stomach tissue of an anopheline mosquito fed four days previously on a malarious patient, Ross found the malaria parasite, from which he proved the role of Anopheles mosquitoes in the transmission of malaria parasites in humans.

Ross took ten days' leave to write a paper, 'On some peculiar pigmented cells found in two mosquitoes fed on malarial blood', and was cautious enough to have his work verified by a colleague, Surgeon-Major John Smyth. He sent this off immediately to the British Medical Journal, which took three months to publish it.

In recognition of his work, Ronald Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902. The notebook is part of the Ross collection and is available to researchers. Please contact the Archives for further enquiries at archives@lshtm.ac.uk.