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Joseph Everett Dutton (1879-1905)"A true Knight of Science..." Joseph Everett Dutton was born in Bebington, Cheshire, in 1879. The fifth son of a pharmacist, he was educated at the King's School, Cheshire, entered the Liverpool Medical School and the Liverpool Royal Infirmary from where he graduated with honours in 1897. In the same year he was appointed to the George Holt fellowship in Pathology and subsequently became resident at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary where he was house-surgeon and later house-physician. In 1900, he joined the School's third expedition to Nigeria and in 1901 he was elected the Walter Myers Fellow in Parasitology. In the same year Dutton undertook his next expedition to the Gambia alone and first recognised the presence of trypanosomes in human blood which would eventually lead to the discovery of the cause of sleeping sickness. In the following year he accompanied John Lancelot Todd to the Gambia and French Senegal on the School's tenth expedition. It was the School's twelfth Expedition in 1904, however, which was to be Dutton's last. The expedition to investigate Trypanosomiasis was sent out to the Congo at the end of 1903 and consisted of Dutton, Todd and Cuthbert Christy. Towards the end of 1904 the expedition had independently demonstrated the cause of tick fever in man. During these investigations, however, both Dutton and Todd contracted the disease. While Todd recovered, Dutton's illness relapsed several times. He continued working throughout this period, keeping a chart recording data and observations concerning his illness. Once he had grown too weak, Todd continued the chart until Dutton's death at Kasongo on 27 February 1905. He was 29 years of age. Dutton's obituary in the British Medical Journal, 1905, records that the high esteem in which Dutton was held by the native people was evident at his funeral: there were twelve coffin bearers, all native sergeants, and over one thousand people came to see the coffin pass to its resting place. In the same obituary Ronald Ross wrote of Dutton:
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