Almroth Wright

Born in Yorkshire on August 10, 1861, Sir Almroth Edward Wright became a leading bacteriologist and immunologist whose work had a lasting impact on public health. He is most often remembered for developing a system of anti-typhoid inoculation and for championing preventive medicine at a time when those ideas were still gaining ground.

Wright worked at the Army Medical School and later at St Mary's Hospital in London, where he carried out important research on immunity, vaccines, and bacterial infection. He also promoted the use of autogenous vaccines, prepared from bacteria taken from an individual patient, and he gained a reputation as an original, forceful, and sometimes controversial scientific thinker.

One of the most striking parts of his legacy is how far ahead he was on antibiotic resistance: long before it became a global concern, he recognized that antibiotics could encourage resistant bacteria. He died on April 30, 1947, but he remains an important figure in the history of immunology and infectious-disease medicine.