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Biography of David Bruce
Name: David Bruce
Birth Date: May 29, 1855
Death Date: November 20, 1931
Place of Birth: Melbourne, Australia
Nationality: Australian
Gender: Male
Occupations: parasitologist, physician
David Bruce
The Australian parasitologist David Bruce (1855-1931) discovered the causes of Malta, or undulant, fever and of sleeping sickness.David Bruce was born on May 29, 1855, in Melbourne, Australia. His family went to Scotland when David was 5. He attended the medical school at Edinburgh University. In 1883 he married Mary Elizabeth Steele, who assisted him in his work throughout his life. Shortly thereafter Bruce was commissioned in the Royal Medical Service and was posted to Malta in 1884. There he studied a serious, often fatal disease, known as Malta or Mediterranean fever, which was prevalent among civilians and military personnel.Malta fever is characterized by a continuous long-lasting fever which rises and falls irregularly, and which has been known in the Mediterranean region since the time of Hippocrates, who accurately described it. Within two years of his arrival in Malta, Bruce found a bacterium in the spleen of a number of fatal human cases of …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…Sleeping Sickness Commission to Uganda, and one of its members, Aldo Castellani, reported finding trypanosomes in the cerebrospinal fluid of a patient. The following year a second commission was dispatched, with Bruce at its head. Following Castellani's lead and aided by his experience with nagana, Bruce proved that trypanosomes, transmitted by the tsetse fly, were the cause of sleeping sickness. Bruce was engaged in sleeping sickness investigations until 1911, when he was posted to the Royal Army Medical College, where during World War I he directed research on louse-carried trench fever and tetanus. He retired in 1919; he died on Nov. 20, 1931, in London. Further Reading There is no book-length biography of Bruce. Frederick Eberson, Man against Microbes: The Story of Preventive Medicine (1963), gives an account of Bruce's work in combating trypanosomiasis. Paul de Kruif's popular Men against Death (1932) offers an interesting account of Bruce's role in the scientific battle against Malta fever.
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