Almroth Edward Wright made several significant contributions to science and is perhaps best known for introducing a vaccination against typhoid fever. Developed near the turn of the twentieth century, the vaccine was used on British soldiers during World War I and was responsible for saving many lives. The disease only claimed the lives of 1,191 British soldiers, instead of a projected 125,000 without the vaccination, according to estimates outlined in Leonard Colebrook's biography, Almroth Wright: Provocative Doctor and Thinker. Numerous honors were bestowed upon Wright for his scientific work, including a knighthood and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, both of which were awarded in 1906.
Wright was born August 10, 1861, in Middleton Tyas, Yorkshire, England. He was the second son of Reverend Charles Henry Hamilton and Ebba Johanna Dorothea (Almroth) Wright. His father was an Old Testament scholar and a militant protestant. His mother was the daughter of a chemistry professor who was also governor of the Royal Mint in Stockholm. In his early years Wright was educated by tutors and lived in Germany and France where his father worked as a minister. Eventually, the family settled in Ireland, and Wright received his university education at Trinity College in Dublin, earning a degree in modern literature in 1882 and a degree in medicine in 1883. Winning a traveling scholarship to the University of Leipzig in Germany, Wright studied medicine there for a year.
Wright then returned to England, and was a bit unsure as to whether the future direction of his career led to literature or medicine; he soon decided to read law, and after two years took the civil service exam. Eventually Wright's interest in science took precedence over his other pursuits. After securing a fairly non-demanding position at the Admiralty in 1885, he also immediately began working evenings at the Brown Institution (University of London) as a science researcher on a volunteer basis. Wright was next offered a demonstratorship in the department of pathology at Cambridge in 1887, then soon after transferred to the department of physiology. Upon working in Germany for several months, Wright accepted a demonstratorship at the University of Sydney, in Australia, in 1889. That same year Wright married Jane Georgina Wilson, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.
In 1892 Wright was offered the chair of the pathology department at the Army Medical School in Netley, England. This was the first time Wright worked close to patients, and he claimed the atmosphere was productive since it never allowed the scientist to become too far removed from the ultimate goal of his work, which was to cure the sick. It was at this time Wright began his research on the phenomenon of blood coagulation, eventually linking clotting time to the presence of calcium in the blood. Laboratory instruments during this period were generally crude and home-made, so Wright--a pioneer in laboratory testing--made his own, developing and producing capillary tubes large enough to hold only a few drops of blood. These instruments could test blood without the necessity of drawing a great deal of it from a patient; all that would be required was a finger prick. Wright also recognized the importance of uniformity in laboratory testing, so he made sure each tube was identical.
Wright discovered that if blood was clotting too slowly, giving the patient a dose of calcium by mouth would speed up the process. Conversely, if clotting occurred too quickly, he found administering citric acid to the patient slowed it down. These same principles were also applied to a situation Wright was experiencing at home. Wright's young child seemed to experience distress when fed cow's milk; upon testing, Wright found cow's milk to have a greater concentration of calcium with harder, thicker clots than breast milk. Adding citrate of soda to the milk made the clots softer and thinner, rendering the milk easier for his child to digest, and thus decreasing digestive pains. Wright then tried feeding lemons to the family cow to see if it would change the concentration of calcium in the milk produced. The cow did not respond, but the housekeeper by this point had had enough and turned in her resignation.
Begins Work on Typhus
Near the turn of the century typhoid fever had a death rate of ten to thirty percent. Although the disease had been partially eradicated with better sewage handling, Wright did not think this would eliminate the problem and believed these methods would break down during a war. Wright wanted to test the effects of injection with a heat-killed typhoid culture, to see if it would produce antibodies. He found it did, but there was what he termed a "negative phase"--a period of one to two days where antibodies seemed to decrease. Nonetheless, he believed his vaccine would be beneficial and set out trying to convince medical authorities of its merits. Wright convinced the War Office committee to set up an experimental situation, using military units over a three year period. Frequencies of inoculation and instances of typhoid records were measured, and in 1909 very positive results were published: Colebrook relates in Almroth Wright that deaths per 1,000 inoculated soldiers were 0.38, while for uninoculated were 3.93.
In 1906, prior to the publication of the typhoid inoculation results, Wright had been knighted and elected to Fellow of the Royal Society. After this success, he turned his lab over to serum production, so the vaccination would be available. Wright also wrote a long letter to the editor of the New York Times urging mandatory inoculation of troops. In 1914, only British troops entered World War I fully inoculated.
In the midst of his typhoid work, Wright had changed positions in 1902, from his professorship at the Army Medical School at Netley to pathologist and professor of pathology at St. Mary's Hospital in London. In 1911, Wright traveled to South Africa to help produce a pneumonia inoculation for the men who were working in the mines. The system Wright developed to inoculate the miners resembled the one he instituted earlier to fight typhus.
During World War I Wright served in France as head of a research lab which worked primarily on wound infections. Wright developed at this time a method using a hypertonic salt solution to draw lymph into open wounds (lymph is a fluid derived from blood and which contains lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell which repels infection). Wright also developed a scientific basis for early wound closure, or suturing, which was not in practice up until that time. Several citations were presented to Wright after World War I, including a special medal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1920 which credited him with providing the best medical work during the war.
Engages in Philosophical Debate
Wright's direct influence on scientific research seemed to taper off after World War I. His indirect influence was felt for many years, however, as several of his students went on to great fame, including Alexander Fleming, the scientist who discovered penicillin. For Wright this era was more a time for reflection and what Colebrook describes in Almroth Wright as the scientist's "search for truth".
Among the reasons contributing to Wright's declining influence may be his rather unpopular views. The treatise The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage, for example, attempted to demonstrate the intellectual and psychological inferiority of women. Although the playwright George Bernard Shaw disagreed with this claim, he was, nevertheless, an admirer of Wright; the lead character in Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma is modeled after Wright, and the idea for the play came from the many discussions the writer shared with Wright as well as other members of the medical profession.
Wright published over 150 papers during his career. He advanced the truly scientific component of research to a great degree due to his insistence on the use of the scientific method, which involves several steps, including the formation of a hypothesis and the testing and confirmation of that hypothesis. Commonly accepted now, the scientific method was a revolutionary idea during Wright's time.
Wright continued his work at St. Mary's Hospital until 1946 and died shortly after in Buckinghamshire, England, on April 30, 1947. Wright was working--literally to the end--on a philosophical work Alethetropic Logic (in Wright's words, "a system of Logic which searches for the Truth"), which was published posthumously through the efforts of his grandson.
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