Sir Leonard Rogers, FRS (1868-1962) and his papers.

Sir Leonard Rogers (Fig. 1) was a "perfect tiger for hard work"' and, moreover, meticulously careful and thorough in everything that he did. It would not, therefore, have surprised his colleagues to learn that he preserved much of the paperwork he acquired during his long career and spent many hours of his retirement sorting, rearranging , and annotating his diaries, records, and correspondence. These papers, comprising twelve boxes, are now stored in the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (Ref. PP/ROG), where they have been listed and indexed and are available to scholars. The extract from his kala azar enquiry notebook of 1896-97 reproduced here (Fig. 2), shows the detail of his research as well as his attempts to clarify it for later users by writing out the headings in longhand. Rogers taught himself shorthand in 1895 (when he had already been in the Indian Medical Service for two years) and used it a great deal. Although only a junior officer in the IMS, his interest in the aetiology and epidemiology of fevers led to his appointment in 1896 to investigate kala azar in Assam. Nowgong District Hospital provided many of the individuals on whom Rogers made detailed clinical and microsurgical examinations, although he was hampered by lack of good equipment or a bacteriological laboratory. Taking blood counts, he investigated the disease at various stages and compared patients who had and had not received quinine. Sir Almroth Wright, writing to Rogers in April that year, put his finger on one of the problems: I am delighted to see that you are getting such good work done, and also that you are getting a chance at a new disease. It will not be an altogether easy business to unravel, for if the coolies have all anchylostoma [sic]2 and I presume all malaria, it will be precious hard to be certain which of the two, or whether the two combined, kill the men off.3 Undeterred, Rogers also went to great lengths to study old records of the Eastern Bengal districts of Dinajpur and Rungpur, for statistics of rainfall and fever mortality. Rogers was impressed by the apparent infectiousness of the disease, both from the evidence he collected in his ten-day trek covering 130 miles in the Mangaldi area on the north bank of the Brahmaputra and after his investigation of the segregation of coolies working …