R. C. Muirhead-Thomson

Abstract

Regretfully-because his wife, Catherine, predeceased him and he had no children and left no other close relatives-the death on 4 October 2000 of Robert Charles Muirhead-Thomson, a world renowned medical entomologist, has only just come to my attention. Muirhead-Thomson was born in Kilmaurs, Scotland, on 2 May 1914. He entered Glasgow University to study Zoology, obtaining his B.Sc. in 1936 and D.Sc. in 1942. (His time as an undergraduate overlapped that of D. S. Bertram and W. H. R. Lumsden.) In 1937, after his first degree, he obtained a Royal-Society grant and conducted research on mosquitoes at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This prepared him for his detailed investigations in the early 1940s on the behaviour of malaria vectors, especially on Anopheles minimus, in Assam, India. These studies were supported in part by another Royal-Society grant and in part by funding from the Colonial Medical Research Service. The latter continued to finance his research from the mid-1940s to early 1950s, in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Tanzania, on the biology of malaria vectors, in particular An. gambiae and An. melas. From 1955-1957, with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Muirhead-Thomson worked on malaria epide~ology in Liberia. For the following 9 years he worked for the World Health Organization, in India and Zimbabwe as well as at their headquarters in Geneva. He then returned briefly to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Although mainly known for his studies on anopheline biology in India and West Africa, he also worked on mosquito behaviour in South Africa, Jamaica and Trinidad. In 1956 he published results of his studies on the transnuss10n, by mosquitoes as well as by fleas, of myxomatosis in England. He thus had experience of mosquito biology in four continents. In 1966, Muirhead-Thomson's career changed direction and he began investigating the effects of insecticides on the larvae of simuliid blackflies, at the then University of Rhodesia. He then returned and settled· in England. With funding from the Leverhulme Foundation and the Medical Research Council, he went firstly to Reading University and then to Royal Holloway College, London University, where he studied the impact pesticides had on simuliids and other aquatic macro-invertebrates. Muirhead-Thomson published about 54 pa· pers, many of which were long and accompanied by his photographs (he was an enthusiastic photographer). His first, on myiasis in sheep in south-western Scotland and· co-authored by A. J. Haddow, was published in 1937 in Parasitology. In his last article, which appeared in 1998 in the Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology (92, 891-893), he vigorously argued that xenodiagnosis of malaria cases had many advantages over taking blood films. Not many of us can claim publications spanning 61 years! In addition to scientific papers, MuirheadThomson wrote seven books (1948-1991). The first was entitled Assam Valley: Beliefs and Customs of the Assamese Hindus. He then published four books on mosquitoes and other blood-sucking flies, followed by two books describing the impact of pesticides on aquatic fauna. I think, however, his book Mosquito Behaviour in Relation to Malaria Transmission and Control in the Tropics, published in 1951 (Edward Arnold, London) remains sci-