On November 6, 1880, Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French army physician stationed in Constantine, Algeria, examined a malaria patient's blood under a microscope and observed pigmented bodies with moving, flagella-like structures emerging from them (exflagellating microgametocytes), the first demonstration that a protozoan parasite, not a bacterium, causes a human disease. The finding was initially met with skepticism; wider medical acceptance followed through the 1880s as other observers confirmed it. The parasite genus was later named Plasmodium. Ronald Ross established in 1897 that Anopheles mosquitoes transmit the parasite between hosts, completing the transmission picture Laveran's discovery had opened. Laveran received the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the role of protozoa in disease.
Facts
Discovery Year Discovery Date DiscovererCharles Louis Alphonse Laveran 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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Sources
1. A History of Medicine
Lois N. Magner, CRC Press
2. Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (Wikipedia)
WikipediaMalaria and discovery of malarial parasite sectionQuote, Malaria and discovery of malarial parasite section
On the 20th October last, while examining by microscope the blood of a patient suffering from malarial fever I observed in the midst of the red blood corpuscles the presence of elements which appeared to me to be of parasitic origin.
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