George Carmichael Low

Who was George Carmichael Low?

George Carmichael Low was a Scottish parasitologist.

He was born in Monifieth, Forfarshire, Scotland, the son of Samuel Miller Low, a manufacturer of flax machinery and educated at the University of St Andrews. Having graduated MA from St Andrews he then studied for a medical degree at Edinburgh University, graduating MD in 1897. For the next two years he was a resident house doctor at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

In November, 1899 he moved to London to work at the new London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine under Patrick Manson. He was sent to Vienna to learn a new technique for sectioning mosquitos and on his return was able to use the technique to prove that mosquitos pass on parasites from person to person during the act of biting.

In 1900 he spent three months in a malaria-ridden part of Italy and by avoiding mosquitos demonstrated that they were responsible for the transmission of the disease. He spent 1901 in the West Indies, confirming Manson's discovery that filaria transmitted by mosquitos was the cause of elephantiasis. In 1903 he was head of a team sent to Uganda to investigate the cause of "sleeping sickness" which unfortunately failed to identify the true cause of the outbreak. His companions were Cuthbert Christy and Aldo Castellani.