GREAT DOCTOR DEAD

Evening Star, Issue 21935, 23 January 1935, Page 11

GREAT DOCTOR DEAD

REVEAIER OF HOOKWORM The death is announced in San Juan, Puerto Rico, of Colonel Bailey Ashford, D.S.M., C.M.G., whose discovery of hookworm in 1899 caused a revolution in tropical medicine. Since that time, the death, rate in Puerto Rico of anaemia, hitherto known as “ the natural death ” for centuries, was reduced by 90 per cent. As a young man in t'he United States Army Medical Service at Puerto Rico, Colonel Ashford began to doubt accepted theories about pernicious anaemia on the islands, one of the most thickly-populated regions of the world. During the course of his unpleasant laboratory work, he discovered the eggs of a worm reported to be found in anaemic Italians who had worked the St. Gothard tunnel. Shortly after he telegraphed to the chief surgeon;— “Have this,day proven the cause of pernicious, progressive anaemia of this island to be due to ancylostomum duodenale.”

Young Ashton was rebuked by his superiors. “ Army people should not fool with civil affairs,” he was told. Physicians were sceptical. Few believed in him. The New York ‘ Medical Journal ’ waited a year before publishing his finding. He was rewarded, however, by seeing the official acknowledgment followed by the development of a method of treatment widely applied in the Southern States in South America, and many tropical countries. The prevalence of hookworm in the United States led Mr John D. Rockefeller to become interested in its eradication, and in forming the basis for wide research which eventually centred in the Rockefeller Foundation to many countries, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and the South Seas.

Before his retirement, after thirty years’ service, Congress conferred on Colonel Ashford the Distinguished Service Medal, and King George decorated him with the Cross of St. Michael and St. George for his services to the British Empire. He represented the United States at the International Congress on Industrial and Ailmentary Hygiene in Brussels in 1910, and at a similar congress in 1928 in Cairo, where he was decorated by the Government of Egypt. His last public appearance was at the Pan-American Medical Congress in New York last spring. In deference to his wish Colonel Ashford was accorded a simple burial near the spot where his discovery was announced.