Harold Wolferstan Thomas

Harold Wolferstan Thomas (* 1875 in Montreal ; † 1931 ) was a Canadian doctor who has made outstanding contributions in particular for advances in the field of tropical medicine .

Life

Harold Wolferstan Thomas was the son of the banker Francis Wolferstan Thomas (1834-1900) and his wife Harriet Amelia Thomas (nee Goodhue). He studied medicine at McGill University in Montreal until 1897 and then worked in Germany, including in Göttingen and Munich , and at the Montreal General Hospital. From 1903 he worked at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), from 1904 as head of a laboratory at the facility in Runcorn. In the same year he took part in an expedition to investigate tropical diseases in the Amazon region. Together with Anton Breinl (1880–1944), he discovered in 1905 that the arsenic-containing preparation atoxyl kills trypanosomes , the pathogens causing sleeping sickness . The studies were carried out on test animals infected with Trypanosoma brucei gambiense , such as mice, dogs and monkeys, and the use of Atoxyl caused a cure or a delay in the course of the disease.

Works

• HW Thomas, A. Breinl: Report on trypanosomes trypasomiasis and sleeping sickness . In: Liverpool School of trop. Med. , Memoir 16, 1905.
• HW Thomas: Some experiments in the treatment of trypanosomiasis . In: British Medical Journal 1905; i: 1140.

literature

• J. Procopio: Harold Wolferstan Thomas: Canadian scientist in medical service in the Amazon . In: Rev Bras Med . 1953 May; 10 (5): 371-4 PMID 13089191 .
• Steven Riethmiller: From Atoxyl to Salvarsan: searching for the magic bullet . In: Chemotherapy . 2005 Aug; 51 (5): 234-42. PMID 16103665