17 - Andrew Balfour (1873–1931): Pioneer of preventive medicine in the tropics and first Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Abstract

Andrew Balfour was born in Edinburgh on March 21, 1873. He was educated at George Watson's College and the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated MB CM in 1894 and MD in 1898. He entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as an advanced student, and obtained the DPH in 1897. He also graduated BSc in public health at Edinburgh in 1900. He worked on typhoid at Cambridge and in Pretoria, where he contracted the infection. During the South African War, he served as a civil surgeon in the Transvaal. In 1901, contact with Manson initiated his interest in the tropical medicine specialty. In 1902 he became director of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories at Khartoum, Medical Officer of that city, and Chief Scientist for The Sudan, member of the Sleeping Sickness Commission, and founder of the floating laboratory on the Nile and White Nile. He strongly advocated care and health of the indigenous population of the Sudan as essential features of Imperial rule. Later, in the West Indies, he was also a member of the Colonial Office Commission on Health in the Colonies. Andrew Balfour's contributions to medicine in the tropics, most of a preventive nature, were numerous. He virtually cleared Khartoum of mosquitoes, discovered the lifecycle of ticks causing spirochaetosis, and during his work in Sudan on protozoa, described a leishmanoid skin disease. Furthermore, he made a prediction—which was later confirmed—that the Red Howler monkey in Trinidad constituted an animal reservoir of yellow fever.