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chance, a gamble! If Ronald Ross could prove mosquitoes were to blame for malaria! Why, a third of all the people in the hospitals in India were in bed with malaria. More than a million a year died, directly or indirectly, because of malaria, in India alone! But if mosquitoes were really to blame—it would be easy!—malaria could be absolutely wiped out. . . . And if he, Ronald Ross, were the man to prove that!
"It is my duty to solve the problem," Ross said. Fictioneer that he was, he called it: "The Great Problem." And he threw himself at Manson's feet. "I am only your hands—it is your problem!" he assured the doctor from China.
"Before you go, you should find out something about mosquitoes," advised Manson, who himself didn't know whether there were ten different kinds of mosquitoes, or ten thousand, who thought mosquitoes could live only three days after they had bitten. So Ross (who didn't know mosquitoes were gnats) looked all over London for books about mosquitoes—and couldn't find any. Too little of a scholar, then, to think of looking in the library of the British Museum, Ross was sublimely ignorant, but maybe that was best, for he had nothing to unlearn. Never has such a green searcher started on such a complicated quest. . . .
He left his wife and children in England, and on the twenty-eighth of March, 1895, he set sail for India, with Patrick Manson's blessing, and full of his advice. Manson had outlined experiments—but how did one go about doing an experiment? But mosquitoes carry malaria! On with the mosquito hunt! On the ship Ross pestered the passengers, begging them to let him prick their fingers for a drop of blood. . . . He looked for mosquitoes, but they were not among the discomforts of the ship, so he dissected cockroaches—and he made an exciting discovery of a new kind of microbe in an unfortunate flying fish that had flopped on the deck. He was ordered to Secunderabad, a desolate military station that sat between hot little lakes in a huge plain dotted with horrid heaps of rocks, and