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Wright, Almroth

Name: Almroth Edward Wright

Achievements: Pioneer of modern vaccine treatment

Born: August 10, 1861; Middleton Tyas, near Richmond, Yorkshire, England

Died: April 30, 1947; Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, England. Aged 96

Field & Discipline: Science; Medicine; Pathologist; Bacteriologist: Immunologist

Language: English

Father: Charles Henry Hamilton Wright

Mother: Ebba Joanna Dorothea Almroth

Siblings: Eric; Charles; Henry; Ernest

Spouse: Jane Georgina Wilson

Children: 2 sons, 1 daughter

Education: Private tutors; Belfast Academical College; Trinity College, Dublin; University of Leipzig

Life & Times:

After university Wright continued his medical education at Leipzig where he studied under [taught by] Weigert* and became familiar with the experimental method of research pioneered by [influenced by] Muller*.

Wright wanted to be a medical research scientist but there were very few grants for this at universities, and at that time no hospital had a bacteriological laboratory. He managed to get funds to study law and when they gave out, took a job as clerk at the Admiralty which gave him enough time off to do unpaid work at London University's Brown Institute, one of the few endowed laboratories in England.

He was rescued from this double life when he got a job as a demonstrator of pathology at Cambridge University in 1887. He found medicine disappointingly conservative at Cambridge and went on a scholarship to Germany where he studied pathological anatomy at Marburg and physiological chemistry at Strasbourg.

He returned to England in 1889 and was offered a job as demonstrator in Australia at the University of Sydney. He tossed a coin to help him decide whether to go for demonstrator in anatomy or physiology.  It turned out to be physiology and from 1889-91 Wright conducted research into diabetes, acidosis and blood clotting at Sydney.

He returned to England in search of better money. In 1892 he became Professor of Pathology at the Army Medical School, Netley,  in Southampton. He had a very easy teaching schedule,  and for the rest of his time could research.

He introduced the concept of experiment and measurement into research, and encouraged his students to develop new techniques and apparatus. Wright's own interests were primarily in bacteriology and blood coagulation, and he was eager to find ways of helping hemophiliacs. He demonstrated new techniques such as those for collecting small blood samples from fingers, observing the effects of blood serum on microbes, and making the capillary glass tubes used in measuring the clotting time of blood.

The fact that the laboratory was situated inside a hospital was particularly pleasing to him because he was believed that contact with the sick was crucial for research workers in medicine.  At Netley, Wright became interested in immunization and began experimenting with Malta fever.

He experimented on himself and had a bad attack of fever for some weeks. While convalescing, Wright thought about finding a vaccination which could be used on humans against typhoid,  which at the time killed large numbers of people. In his research, he used his own body, and those of colleagues who volunteered.  He wrote his first paper on the subject in 1897. 

Soon afterwards a typhoid  outbreak occurred at a nearby asylum. Wright inoculated some of the staff who volunteered and among them there were no cases of typhoid fever. Among those not inoculated, one in four succumbed to the disease.

Doctors who studied under Wright inoculated some of the army troops bound for India in 1898, and the success of the vaccine was again confirmed. Wright pushed the idea during his membership of the India Plague Commission in 1898-1900 and the government agreed to use the vaccine during the Boer War (1899-1901) in South Africa.

In 1902 he resigned his post at Netley and took a job as professor of pathology at St Mary's Hospital in London,  where he continued his immunological work, assisted by

a team including [assistant was] Alexander Fleming*, who later discovered penicillin.  Wright also established his own medical practice, partly for the money and also to keep him in touch with patients.

His laboratory at St Mary's was recognised as a center of excellence both in England and abroad, and in 1906 he was knighted for his work on the typhoid vaccine. He also produced a vaccine against enteric tuberculosis.

In 1911, he was invited to South Africa where they were trying to prevent the African workers in the Rand gold mines from catching pneumonia. Wright's introduction of prophylactic inoculations succeeded in reducing the death rate.

During World War I (1914-18) Wright ran a wound-infection research laboratory in France. He provided evidence justifying the early closure of wounds, and pioneered the application of a hypertonic salt solution which acted as an osmotic agent to draw lymph into wounds to aid the healing process.

He remained at St Mary's until he retired in 1946. Wright was violently antifeminist, for example, and wrote a book and letters to the press trying to prove that women were biologically and psychologically inferior to men. [used for role by] George Bernard Shaw* used him as a model for a character in his play: “The Doctor’s Dilemma.”

Extra Connections: [visited by] Koch* and [visited by] Ehrlich* visited Wright’s lab at St Mary’s.

Fleming mentor Almroth Wright was wrong about scurvy, which may have helped doom Robert Scott.  Wright was a strong proponent of the Ptomaine theory for the cause of Scurvy.[8] The theory was that poorly preserved meats contained alkaloids that were poisonous to humans when consumed. This theory was prevalent when Robert Falcon Scott planned his fateful expedition to the Antarctic in 1911. In 1932, the true cause of the disease was determined to be the deficiency from the diet of a particular nutrient, now called Vitamin C (Ascorbic acid, Scorbic meaning Scurvy).  More on scurvy

Assessment: One of the foremost immunologists of his time.

Oneliner: Almroth Wright,  immunology pioneer

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