Frederick Percival Mackie
Colonel Frederick Percival Mackie CSI OBE KHS FRCP FRCS (19 February 1875 – 15 July 1944) was an English physician who served in the Indian Medical Service between 1901 and 1931 working on the incidence, transmission, and pathology of insect-borne tropical diseases.
Born on 19 February 1875 to Annis, née Bennett, and John Mackie, rector of Filton, Gloucestershire, England, Frederick Percival ("Per") was the second of their four surviving children.
Her family chronicles provided much of the material included in a memoir by one of her grandchildren, which contains a more detailed account of Percival Mackie's early years, his boyhood adventures and schooling, his academic successes, the women he married, his character, and career highlights as seen from her maternal perspective.
As Saunders scholar (1897) and silver medallist at Bristol General Hospital, he completed his final exams in 1898 and was immediately appointed to a position as Casualty Officer and House Physician.
As he later put it in his Presidential address to the Medical Research Section of the Indian Science Congress "For nearly twenty years my principal interest has been in the relationship of insects to the transmission of disease, having devoted successive periods of time to fleas and plague, bugs and lice and relapsing fever, mosquitoes and malaria, tse-tse flies and sleeping sickness, and to the insect side of the kala-azar problem.
"[7] While at the Plague Research Laboratory he made what was probably his chief contribution to medicine, the discovery that the body louse, a blood-sucking insect, might serve as a vector for the transmission of relapsing fever.
In August 1907 Mackie was sent to investigate an outbreak of relapsing fever that had broken out at a mission settlement in Nasik (now Nashik), in the state of Maharashtra.
Confirmation of the body louse as vector came from microscopic examination of the lice, which showed they were carrying large numbers of the spirochetes characterizing the human disease and that they were multiplying within the insects' stomachs.
[8] A pressing issue at the time was the possibility of African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) spreading to India via similar blood-sucking insect vectors.
In September 1908, at the request of the Indian Government, Captain Mackie was attached to the Royal Society's Sleeping Sickness Commission headed by Sir David Bruce F.R.S.
The work in Africa represented a huge step forward in the understanding of trypanosome-related diseases not only in humans (using monkeys as models) but in domestic cattle and wild animals, including elephants.
Examination of 273 patients showed an abundance of LD bodies (cells infected with a non-motile stage of the parasite Leishmania donovani) in the blood and in splenic biopsies.
In 1920 Mackie was professor of pathology at Calcutta University, but after a year took up the position of Director of the Pasteur Institute in Shillong, Assam, and was simultaneously appointed Honorary Surgeon to the Viceroy (VHS).
Two years later, promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, he became Director of the Haffkine Institute in Bombay (previously the Plague Research Laboratory), a position he held until his retirement from the IMS in 1932.
In a letter written in 1923 to his future wife Mary Owen, Mackie summarized his main responsibilities as Director of the Haffkine Institute as (a) overseeing the preparation of an anti-plague vaccine which was sent all over the Eastern world from Cape Town to Japan, about a million doses a year (b) supervision of a Pasteurian section for anti-rabies treatment (c) overseeing collection of snake venom from snakes held at the Institute's own snake farm for production of antivenoms (d) conducting his own individual research, e.g. working closely with Neil Hamilton Fairley on schistosomiasis and sprue (e) serving, effectively, as the court of appeal in all matters for the Province as regards epidemiology, pathology etc.
These administrative jobs doubtless involved much tedious paperwork and attendance at meetings, but they also offered opportunities for travel to interesting places, including trips to distant countries, which he much enjoyed.
In 1942 he recalled that he had "Represented the Government on International Commissions in Paris, Warsaw, Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore, Tokio and Peking, returning from the last by the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Hamerton notes, though he did much important primary research, his major contributions lay in the administrative sphere of tropical hygiene: "Neither fads nor fancies nor self interest obscured his professional or social affairs.
An obituarist noted that "he surprised his friends by taking, despite his age, the appointment of chief medical officer of the British Overseas Airways Corporation.
In this capacity he travelled thousands of miles from one end of Africa to the other, not apparently in any way affected by heat or fatigue, and was able to his great delight to view from the air herds of game in those vast wild regions where, as a young man, he hunted them on foot."
In April 1920, Gladys gave birth to a son, Lawrence Percival, but the following year she fell seriously ill with multiple sclerosis and had to be taken back to England for treatment.
After her death in 1922, Mackie took an extended leave and returned to India via the western route, visiting the United States, Canada (where two of his brothers had settled),[20] Japan, China, Mongolia, Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Burma.
His work on plague, relapsing fever, sleeping sickness, kala-azar, enteric dysentery, cholera, schistosomiasis, hydrophobia, and sprue was original and of first rate quality; but his administrative gifts and their contribution to tropical hygiene were of almost higher value."
The Grübler stains he used for his histological work and for identifying blood parasites are now in the permanent collection of the Royal College of Surgeons Museum in London.
