Charles Donovan

A fatal infectious disease called visceral leishmanis (kala-azar as it was called in Hindi) was widespread in India just after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The first epidemic was reported in 1870 by British medical officers from Assam. In 1900 William Boog Leishman first discovered the protozoan parasite from an English soldier who was stationed at Dum Dum, West Bengal, and died at the Army Medical School in Netley, England. But he mistook the parasite to be degenerate trypanosomes, already known protozoan parasites in Africa and South America. In 1903 Leishman published his discovery in the British Medical Journal, which appeared on 11 May. It was titled "On the possibility of the occurrence of trypanosomiasis in India." On 17 June 1903 Donovan found the parasites (by then known as "Leishman bodies") from the spleen tissue and in the blood of an infected young boy who was admitted to the Government General Hospital. Donovan identified the Leishman bodies as the causative agents of kala-azar. At the time the disease was believed to be a quinine-resistant malaria. He wrote a commentary of his discovery in relation to that of Leishman in the same journal (using the same title as Leishman's), which appeared on 11 July 1903.[6] Soon a controversy arose as to whom such monumental discovery should be credited. Donovan sent some of his slides to Ronald Ross, who was in Liverpool, and to Alphonse Laveran at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Laveran and his colleague Félix Mesnil identified the protozoan (and yet wrongly) to be members of Piroplasmida, and gave the scientific name Piroplasma donovanii. It was Ross who resolved the conflict of priority in the discovery and correctly identified the species as member of the novel genus Leishmania. He gave the popular name "Leishman-Donovan bodies", and subsequently the valid binomial Leishmania donovani, thereby equally crediting the two rivals.[7][8][9] But the reconciliation was not embraced by Londoners, who still wanted to remove Donovan's name. Donovan's continued works on the biology of L. donovani however established him as the leading authority on kala-azar.[3]

In 1881 a Scottish professor of surgery, Kenneth MacLeod described lesions of dermal ulcer in Madras as "serpiginous ulcer". In 1896 J.H. Conyers and C.W. Daniels reported the same disease as "lupoid form of the so-called groin ulceration" in New Guinea. In 1897 similar symptom was described by J. Galloway as "ulcerating granuloma of the pudendum" from one infected person in London. This became a commonly used medical term. Even after twenty years the nature of the causative agent was elusive. In 1905 Charles Donovan prepared tissue smears from the ulcerative mouth of a ward boy in Madras hospital. Under the microscope he found intracellular bodies as the cause of the lesion. He described these bodies as like "gagantic bacilli with rounded ends." Even though he regarded them as parasitic protozoans, the nature of these bodies was a matter of dispute.[10] They were simply referred to as "Donovan's bodies".[11] In 1910 R.M. Carter demonstrated a large number of the pathogens in large monocytes and he noted their resemblance to protozoans such as Crithidium and Herpetomonas. The description was similar to Donovan's bodies, hence, they were considered to be members of Sporozoa, and the scientific name Donovania granulomatis was introduced. In 1913 H.D. Aragão and G. Vianna gave the binomial Calymmatobacterium granulomatis noting their similarities to bacteria from their (rather dubious) cell culture.[12][13] The scientific name was ultimately changed to Klebsiella granulomatis based on the phylogenetic relationship with the genus Klebsiella.[14][15]