Willoughby Lowe in The End of the Trail noted that it was on their second visit to Goaso (i.e. during the 1934-35 expedition to Gold Coast) that blood samples were obtained from the specimens of monkeys they shot, including Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus. He wrote:
…the blood sample of the new monkey, brought home by my companion for Dr. Findlay, of the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research.
The importance of this sample is that it contained antibodies to yellow fever, indicating that at some stage of its life it had been infected. Blood they collected from specimens of other species contained no antibodies against yellow fever. Such research was a beginning to the understanding of the role of asymptomatic non-human primates as reservoir species for the virus in Africa and the complex interactions between populations of insect vectors, human and non-human primates.
Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus thus found its way into the classic texts on yellow fever.
Does Lowe’s mention of Fannie Waldron ‘my companion’ indicate merely that she delivered the phials to Findlay or that she was responsible for their collection and treatment? Did, I wonder, Findlay have some sort of standing arrangement with the Natural History Museum, asking collectors to obtain serum samples from mammals living in yellow fever areas?
The two papers of interest by Findlay and several co-workers are behind an Elsevier paywall. However, the gist is that Findlay with collaborators from the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s laboratory in Sierra Leone, in a preliminary papers published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in January 1936, reported antibodies in a Chimpanzee, a baboon and the red colobus. A later paper showed that Findlay with a colleague at the Wellcome had obtained further blood samples from the Gold Coast, this time obtained by two medical men and George Soper Cansdale (1909-1993), then a forestry officer and part-time naturalist.
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| George William Marshall Findlay Photograph by Bassano Wellcome Collection |
George William Marshall Findlay (1893-1952) was at the forefront of research on yellow fever in the British Empire. While a medical student in Edinburgh he immediately volunteered as a medical assistant with the Belgian Army. For that he received an award from Belgium in 1914. He then graduated in 1915 and on 24 December was commissioned as ’temporary Surgeon in His Majesty’s Fleet’ in the words of the London Gazette. After the war, he held medical research fellowships and was then appointed as assistant pathologist to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. In Edinburgh he acquired both an MD to (with gold medal), and a DSc. (there was no PhD then, and the DSc in Scottish universities was very different to that awarded today). After a spell at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund he joined the Wellcome Bureau of Scientific Research and began research into tropical viral diseases, including yellow fever in the field in Gambia. He wrote Advances in Chemotherapy in 1930, that term being used for chemical treatment of all diseases, infectious as well as non-infectious. During the second world war he was brought into the Royal Army Medical Corps to investigate yellow fever in Sudan and trench fever in Tunis and by 1942 was a Brigadier in the West Africa Command.
Findlay received civil honours for his work on yellow fever. He left Wellcome in 1948 to join the staff of the British Medical Association to become editor of two abstracting journals: Abstracts of World Medicine and Abstracts of World Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynaecology. He had wide interests including microscopy and in 1950 was elected became President of the Royal Microscopical Society.
Findlay GM, Stefanopoulo GJ, Davey TH, Mahaffy AF. 1936. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 29, 419-424.
Findlay GM, MacCallum FO. 1937. Yellow fever immune bodies in the blood of African primates. Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 31, 103-106.
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