MARTYR TO SCIENCE

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 12 November 1927, Page 11

MARTYR TO SCIENCE

TT is generally acknowledged here that the death at the early age of 49 years of Dr. Adrian .Stokes, at Lagos, West Africa, has deprived the Empire of one ’of its most eminent pathologists'. He was due to return next month from the researches he was conducting as a member of the Bockeieller Commission on Yellow Fever. He had visited West Africa in 1920 as a member of the same commission, and he knew well the peril of his task when he asked this year for his leave to be extended to six months to enable him to continue the work. Professor .Stokes was one of tne brilliant band of young scientists who in the last decade have waged unceasing war against the smaller, but no less deadly on mat account, of the enemies of man. In the Great War, and more intensely since the close of hostilities, he brought deep scientific knowledge, immense labour and brilliant inspiration to bear on yellow fever and other parasitical diseases which have proved a menace to human life in the tropics and a barrier to the development' of some of the richest places of the earth. As professor of bacteriology in Dublin University he inspired many students to pursue research work, and published many papers of importance. Professor T. B. Johnston, Dean of Guy’s Hospital Medical School, lias made the following statement: ‘‘Stokes knew quite wen that in going out to West Africa to engage in this fight against yellow fever he was running risks to iiis own life, but he was never a man to spare himself. He caught the infection, I should think, from one of the infected mosquitoes which he was keeping for experimental purposes. Stokes had been out to Africa before. Immediately after the war the Rockefeller Commission invited him to do some work on yellow fever on the Gold Coast, and he was out there for some time. We hoped that as a result he nad become immune from the disease. ‘‘Early this year the. Rockefeller Commission found themselves against a dead-end. They wanted a fresh brain

PROFESSOR ADRIAN STOKES

to help them. They decided to invite Stokes, who had very much impressed them, to go out to West Afriea for six months. He went out in May and had made quite definite and substantial progress toward solving the problem of the transmission of yellow fever and its ae. tual causative organism. He had done what had not been done out there before.

‘‘He had succeeded in transmitting the disease to young chimpanzees by infecting them from the blood of human patients. He had also succeeded in infecting chimpanzees with yellow fever by means of mosquitoes, which had been fed on human patients. A few days before he was taken ill I had a letter from him saying, ‘We have hooked our fish. It is now just a matter of landing him. Unless we are careless or the tackle breaks, that is only a question of time. 'The time may be years, but it must come. ’ ‘/He had not been out in France very long before he appreciated the importance of a mobile laboratory, of which there were none in France at that time. He agitated until he got [himself a motor-bicycle and side-car, I with whien he used to go up and down the line attending to suspected eases of typhoid, dysentery, and so on. IHe did a great .deal of research work on the various diseases that sprang up in France, and according to some people he really did more than any other one man to improve the general conditions for the wounded, the gassed, and the sick.

‘‘■One day Stokes discovered in the Ypres salient that the gassed men were being given oxygen by means of an ordinary face inask. The patients did not like the method,' and it was not doing them much good. Stokes disappeared and came back with yards and yards of tubing, and gave the oxygen by passing it through the tube right down to the windpipe. People who were with him saidj that any number ■of lives were saved by his improvement in the method of giving oxygen alone.”