Abstract

If ever a prize is to be given for the most cantankerous figure in the history of science and medicine, Almroth Wright will surely be on the short list. With the exception of himself, Wright was a man who did not tolerate fools lightly. Even the author of this biography, who tries very hard to see Wright's point of view, becomes exasperated with him at times. More commonly known today as Sir Colenso Ridgeon in George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma, Wright was born of stern, fanatical Irish Protestant parents in 1861. Extremely gifted, Wright graduated first in modern languages at Trinity College, Dublin. After switching to and qualifying in medicine, a gadfly postgraduate career followed. His first permanent job was as pathologist at the army's medical headquarters at Netley near Southampton, where Wright developed the agent for which his name remains inscribed on the bacteriologists' roll of honor: prophylactic typhoid vaccine. Its passage into common use, however, was far from easy. Statisticians, clinicians, and military authorities lined up against him. Wright's belief in the vaccine's value was vindicated in World War I. The controversy over its efficacy has been analyzed by J. Rosser Matthews in his Quantification and the Quest for Medical Certainty . Dunnill does not refer to this, but, there again, scarcely any modern secondary source is recognized in this book. This is not that sort of a biography, which is not to decry its great merits. Dunnill is a pathologist who sticks very close to the primary sources, including large amounts of hitherto‐unpublished manuscript material. His approach is very evaluative of what Wright got scientifically right and wrong by today's criteria, but the judgments are made in a subdued and relatively unobtrusive way. This is a great virtue in dealing with any aspect of the volatile Wright. His views on woman's place in the world and her claim for the right to vote would drive any intolerant feminist historian to apoplexy. Dunnill, however, takes great pains to situate Wright's views in context.A man like Wright was never going to be happy at Netley since the military hierarchy weighed on him, crushing his individualism. Only the dictatorial control of an autonomous empire would suit him, and this is what he eventually got. Wright became the head of the pathology department at St. Mary's Hospital, London, and there he was effectively responsible to nobody. This was possible because he turned his laboratory into a vaccine‐producing factory and used the drug company Parke Davies to market his products. These included not only prophylactic agents but now‐discredited ones for the treatment of the then‐common bacterial diseases such as pneumonia. The Great War saw Wright in France struggling to introduce another innovation that was finally accepted. “Listerian antisepsis” was a hallowed phrase among surgeons, and the more infected war wounds became the more intense became their antiseptic applications—sadly, to little effect. Wright campaigned for simple saline washing of wounds, a practice eventually adopted with much better results. After the war, separated from his wife, at odds with the Medical Research Council, and estranged from some of his colleagues , Wright turned to the consolations of philosophy—unfortunately writing rather than just reading it. His otiose productions solving the riddle of the universe now lie unread. This conventional but highly readable biography offers no new insights into the science of the period, but it does merit attention as a study of the relations of personality and empire building