In 1880, Griffith Evans, an army veterinary surgeon in India, made the seminal discovery that blood parasites – then universally considered benign – were pathogenic. Spurned by peers and colleagues, his conclusions from experiments with diseased horses were acknowledged by Koch and Pasteur, but it took many years before his achievement received general recognition.The son of a farmer near Tywyn, Meirionnydd, Evans was commissioned as a veterinary officer in the Royal Artillery. He ...