Killed in action: microbiologists and clinicians as victims of their occupation. Part 4: Tick-borne Relapsing Fever, Malta Fever, Glanders, SARS.

A microbiologist and pathologist, who was engaged in research on African Tick-borne Relapsing Fever, Joseph Everett Dutton (Fig. 1), became a victim of this disease. He was born on 9th of September 1874 in Higher Bebington, Cheshire, as the fifth son of the chemist John Dutton, was educated from 1888 to 1892 in the King’s School of Chester, and entered the Liverpool Medical School and the Royal Infirmary in the same town. In 1897 he was graduated and was appointed to the George Holt Fellowship in Pathology. One year in the Departments of Surgery followed. He undertook his first scientific expedition in 1900 as a member of the third expedition of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine together with H.E. Annett and J.H. Elliott. They studied malaria and filariasis. At the beginning of 1901 Dutton travelled alone in the Gambia. It was the sixth expedition of the Liverpool School. On May 10, Dr. R.M. Forde, Colonial surgeon at the hospital in Bathurst, demonstrated a patient, where he (Forde) had found in the blood ‘‘very many actively moving worm-like bodies whose nature he was unable to ascertain’’ (Dutton, 1902). The patient went back to England where Dutton examined him again, but he found no parasites in his blood. This patient, a 42year-old government employee, came back to the Gambia several months later. Dutton, who was also back to the colony, examined him on December 15, 1901, and ‘‘found a flagellate protozoon evidently belonging to the genus Trypanosoma’’ and he suggested ‘‘that the name ‘Trypanosoma gambiense’’’ [should] ‘‘be given to this trypanosoma’’ (Dutton, 1902). We have told earlier the whole story in this journal (Köhler, 2002). Because this patient was also ill with malaria Dutton did not realize the relation between sleeping sickness and trypanosomes. The tenth expedition of the Liverpool School led Dutton in 1902 together with J.L. Todd and C. Christy in 1903 to Belgian Congo. The King of Belgium placed a considerable amount of