On Aug. 20, 1897, Sir Ronald Ross made his landmark discovery. While dissecting the stomach tissue of an anopheline mosquito fed four days previously on a malarious patient, he found the malaria parasite and went on to prove the role of Anopheles mosquitoes in the transmission of malaria parasites in humans.

Sir Ross received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on the transmission of malaria