Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine

The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine stands in the city centre, close to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. It occupies buildings near the docks that once carried trade with West and South Africa. The school was founded in 1898 by ship owner Sir Alfred Lewis Jones. He recognised that Liverpool’s port brought tropical diseases to the city’s hospitals. With local businessmen and health pioneers, he pledged £350 a year for three years to start research. The school became the first in the world dedicated to tropical medicine. It soon recruited leading figures such as physician Rubert Boyce as its first dean. Boyce appointed Ronald Ross, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria. Other early staff included Joseph Everett Dutton, who discovered trypanosomes causing sleeping sickness, and Harold Wolferstan Thomas, who developed its first effective treatment. The school also set up a veterinary medicine department and opened its own laboratory in 1914. Visitors find a modern research institution with a strong historical presence. The school’s emblem shows a Viking longboat under sail, reflecting Liverpool’s maritime past and its mission to explore unknown regions. Inside, laboratories and lecture rooms support research into malaria and insect-borne diseases. The school maintains links with overseas programmes, including one in Malawi that studies local diseases. Its Pembroke Place building remains a centre for teaching and discovery in tropical medicine.