Sir Patrick Manson. The Scottish physician and pioneer of tropical medicine , 1844-1922. Manson qualified in medicine at Aberdeen in 1865, and then worked in China for 23 years. He virtually founded the specialty of tropical medicine, in part by his studies of tropical parasitic infection. He studied the life-cycle of the parasite causing filariasis, and deduced that it is passed to man by Culex mosquitoes. In 1894 he suggested that malaria was also spread by a mosquito. He studied flukes, ringworms and guinea worms, and he effectively founded the London School of Tropical Medicine.