Monkey in a Box Cage, 17th century. Private collection, Malta.

As a zoologist interested in Malta’s chequered history, I was an avid reader of Giovanni Bonello’s fascinating two-part article (The Sunday Times of Malta, April 27 and May 4) about a rather unusual and unexpected subject – monkeys and Malta.

With his customary dose of humour, Bonello provided readers with an eclectic account of the part played by our simian relatives in Malta’s history, art and language, ranging from the frivolous to the tragic. I would like to add another primate-related affair to those included in Bonello’s article.

I am referring to the use of monkeys as experimental animals in the research on Malta Fever by David Bruce and Temi Zammit. On Boxing Day in 1886, Surgeon-Captain David Bruce, while stationed in Malta, observed the causative agent of Mediterranean Fever (later given the name of brucellosis in recognition of his work) in microscope slides prepared from the spleen of a soldier who had succumbed to the disease that same day.

Six months later, he managed to isolate the bacterium, which he called Micrococcus melitensis (since renamed Brucella melitensis), in agar nutrient jelly inoculated with spleen tissue from nine fatal cases of Mediterranean Fever. Bruce proceeded to inoculate experimental monkeys with the bacteria from the pure cultures obtained, after which he again isolated Micrococcus melitensis from the spleen of the dead monkeys.

This indisputably proved that the bacterium was the cause of Mediterranean Fever. Prior to Bruce’s discovery, outbreaks of Mediterranean Fever in Malta were attributed to ‘effluvia’ from sewage-contaminated subsoil or to the waters of the Grand Harbour, which were heavily polluted with sewage from the surrounding cities and waste discharged by ships in port.

At the time of Bruce’s discovery, no financial help was given to medical research in the army, and it is believed that Bruce had to pay for the expensive experimental monkeys out of his own salary.

Eighteen years later in 1904, Zammit, who had just been appointed to the Mediterranean Fever Commission (MFC), succeeded in isolating the bacterium from goats’ milk. This was a ground-breaking discovery which was to open the way to successful prevention of Malta Fever, which was then prevalent in Malta, especially among British servicemen.

In the course of his research, Zammit also recovered the pathogen from the blood of an infected monkey. Revealing a truly colonialist mentality, Major Horrocks, who was in charge of the MFC, was sceptical about the results obtained by his Maltese subordinate and wrote in a letter to Bruce: “I have taken some monkeys down to the Station Hospital in order to repeat the experiments free from Maltese influence!”

Horrocks published his results which confirmed those of Zammit but had the temerity to remark that “[my] experiments…… do not support Zammit’s results”. This was just one in a series of attempts to shift the credit for the goats’ milk discovery from Zammit to his British co-workers.

David Dandria

Sliema

• I would like to add some information to the very interesting feature by Giovanni Bonello on monkeys and Malta (The Sunday Times of Malta, April 27 and May 4) about the involvement of monkeys with medical studies.

In their experimental research on Brucellosis, at the time still known as Mediterranean Fever, two eminent medical doctors, James Kennedy and Sir Temi Zammit, used primates to test how bacteria left the body of goats and how long the bacteria survived in the blood.

Kennedy came to Malta from Glasgow in 1904. Among the many posts he occupied was membership of the Mediteranean Fever Commission and of the Malta Branch of the British Medical Association. He graduated medical doctor from Perth Academy and Edinburgh University in 1900, was awarded the Diploma in Tropical Studies and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1925. Kennedy’s doctoral thesis dwelt mostly with the incidence and diffusion of what was then still known as Mediterranean Fever.

The first monkeys arrived in Malta from Africa in July 1904. Kennedy and Zammit started theit experiments in the same year in a room at the Valletta Military Hospital, the erstwhile Sacra Infermeria, now the Mediterranean Conference Centre. It is now no longer possible to identify the rooms where the monkeys were kept, together with two guinea pigs, eight rabbits and eight mice, because of structural alterations carried out in the building in 1978. Experimental inoculation against the disease started in 1905. The two doctors concluded, as a result of their experiments, that the disease was in some way connected with goats.

David Bruce, then Surgeon-Captain at the Valletta Military Hospital, working together with Giuseppe Caruana Scicluna,confirmed the existence of the microbe of Mediterranean Fever in 1887, but Bruce isolated the Micrococccus Melitensis’ when working alone. Caruana Scicluna joined the Malta Health Department as a sanitary inspector in1890 and was eventually appointed Chief Government Medical Officer. He provided Bruce with the needed apparatus and supplies he required for his experiments.

The use of monkeys for experimental purposes and tests was very widespread in the 19th and 20th centuries, but is now considered controversial for ethical reasons.