George Giglioli

Dr. George Giglioli OBE, (1897 – 1975) was an Anglo-Italian physician who worked as a malariologist in British Guiana. His four decades of work helped reduce the instances of malaria in the colony drastically.

Biography He was born in Pisa, Italy, son of the Italian chemist Italo Emilio Giglioli and the English author Constance H. D. Stocker. He entered the University of Pisa in 1915 to study medicine, but was called for military duty in 1916. Captured for 18 months, he assisted in the prison hospital. After the war he went back to his studies, and received his medical degree in 1921. He continued at the London School of Tropical Medicine, and moved to Guyana in 1922 as medical officer for the Demerara Bauxite Company at Mackenzie, Guyana. The mine employed more than 1,000 workers, and the company supplied medical services to the workers and the surrounding population.

In 1925, he set up a new hospital with trained staff, sterile operating room and a proper lab to fight diseases like hookworm and malaria, which were rampant among the population. He spent time researching malaria in an effort to be able to control the disease better. After the Great Depression as good as shut down the bauxite mines, he found employment with Davson & Co., a sugar company in the Berbice Estuary. There he focused on improving general health and living standards for the malnourished sugar workers, including upgrading housing, water supply and waste disposal.

At the end of 1936, as his contract with Davsons was set to expire, Giglioli received a personal invitation from his friend and colleague J.C. Gibson, the Senior Director of Booker Brothers—the country's largest sugar producer, controlling about 70% of production—at his Port Mourant estate. The two had first met in 1933 during a two-week Atlantic crossing, where they discussed tropical disease and estate health conditions. Gibson, who had nearly 40 years of experience in the sugar industry, valued Giglioli's expertise and urged him to visit Port Mourant to explore opportunities. Without this invitation, Giglioli's career in Guyana would have ended, as he had no other immediate prospects in the colony amid the lingering effects of the Great Depression and rising European tensions; instead, it proved decisive, leading him to join Bookers and head medical surveys and health improvements across the company's estates, which launched his large-scale malaria control efforts.

Giglioli carried on malaria research and identified the Anopheles darlingi mosquito as the main malaria carrier in Guyana. In 1939 he was placed in charge of a Malaria Research Unit which was established with funds from the Colonial Government, the Rockefeller Foundation and the British Guiana Sugar Producers' Association. Guyana honoured him with a stamp in 1978.

His unpublished autobiography was written six years before he died.

He died on 14 January 1975 in Washington D.C. He had two sons, Enzo Giglioli and Marco Giglioli (1927–1984), who was also a malariologist, and worked as the director of the Mosquito Research and Control Unit of the Caymans.