Walter Myers

Walter Myers BSc, MA, MB BChir, MRCS, LRCP (28 March 1872 – 20 January 1901) was a British physician, toxicologist and parasitologist who died of yellow fever aged 28 while studying the disease in Brazil.

Early life Walter Myers was born on 28 March 1872 in Edgbaston, the only son of George Myers (b.1841) and Flora Wertheimer (1851–1921) granddaughter of Chief Rabbi Akiba Wertheimer and niece of German philosopher Constantin Brunner. His older sister Violet was a classical singer and younger sister Stella was a noted psychologist and psychotherapist. His firstborn nephew, Walter Myers Churchill (b.1907 d.1942), was named in his memory.

Education Myers went to King Edward's High School, Birmingham, as a Foundation Scholar.

In 1889 he left the High School with a Natural Science Scholarship, tenable for three years in Mason's College, Birmingham (now Birmingham University), where he studied in the biological laboratory while preparing for the Intermediate BSc. Examination (London), and won the Senior Botanical Prize. a scholarship given by the University of Cambridge for original pathological research, on the recommendation of Professor Kanthack for Myers’ work on blood and its diseases, and on the theory of immunity. He then went to Berlin under Professor Robert Koch, a pioneering microbiologist and founder of modern bacteriology who received the Nobel Prize in 1905 for his groundbreaking research on tuberculosis; and subsequently to Frankfurt under Professor Paul Ehrlich who received the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his contributions to immunology. In 1881 the Cuban epidemiologist Dr Carlos Finlay was the first to theorise that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes, but this remained unproven in the wider scientific community. While en route to Brazil they visited the U.S. Naval Hospital (now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center) in Washington where they met U.S. Surgeon General George Miller Sternberg who is considered the first U.S. bacteriologist, in Pari where Durham recovered but Myers died four days later, aged 28. and a full report was published the following year.

A fund (to which his father and uncle Charles Samuel contributed) was set up to fund a permanent Walter Myers Chair of Parasitology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and also a 5-year fellowship called the Walter Myers Fellowship of Tropical Medicine. The Chair still exists, with Prof Stephen A Ward the current incumbent.

A Scholarship in Myers' name is awarded in Caius College Cambridge for outstanding results obtained in the Part II year.