So wrote Dr Virginia van der Lande MA Ph.D FLS FZS #2008 on the web family tree, when sending to the Trust an item from The Linnean Society’s latest newsletter. It was titled “Thomas Spencer Cobbold’s drawings of the hidden lives of parasites,” and explained that the Society’s Collections Team is cataloguing the Society’s papers, a collection of lecture notes, letters and illustrations which were read to the Society’s meetings. Whilst the collection is a treasure in its own right, many of the drawings are worthy of their own story as one of our Treasures of the Month.
These drawings were made by Dr Thomas Spencer Cobbold (1828-1886) #174, the year before he died, He joined the Society as a Fellow in 1857, and was the foremost authority on animal parasites in England. His research into the anatomy, development and life history of Entozoa was considered ‘a worthy memorial of patient and accurate labour’ and set a ‘standard of reference for all students of Helminthology.’ Cobbold exhibited 85 drawings of Entozoa in his ”Observations on Entozoa, with notices of several new species” and a further 33 in “On some new forms of Entozoa.”
The details in these drawings are striking, not only in their depiction of the internal organs, but also the locations of the parasites in the organs, and the expression of the different stages in the parasite lifecycle. It is both fascinating, and a bit unnerving, to see the sheer length of these organisms in these organs at the height of their prosperity!
It is as well to remember that until Thomas Spencer Cobbold’s work, we the human race were amongst parasites’ principal hosts.
Our thanks to Luke Thorne, Assistant Archivist of the Linnean Society and, of course, Virginia van der Lande, a long-standing fellow of the Society.
