David Bruce (microbiologist)

Sir David Bruce (* May 29, 1855 in Melbourne, † November 20, 1931 in London ) was an Australian- English physician and microbiologist.

He studied medicine in Edinburgh and was treated as a medical officer in the then British possession of Malta. There he studied with his wife Elisabeth Mary Bruce today named after them as brucellosis Malta fever. They discovered and described together with Themistocles Zammit in 1887 the causative agent of this zoonosis than the rod-shaped bacteria of the Brucella.

Later they succeeded in the discovery of the causative agent of epizootic disease nagana, Trypanosoma brucei and they operated the epidemiological research on sleeping sickness in Africa. About 1894 succeeded for the first time the discovery that an insect carries pathologic protozoa.

1922 Bruce was awarded the Buchanan Medal of the Royal Society.