It was not long before the school, helped largely by private donations from individuals like Mary Kingsley (the author of "Travels in West Africa" and an expert in African culture), began to flourish. The school soon recruited the eminent physician Rubert Boyce as its inaugural dean. Boyce then set about the business of appointing teaching staff and secured the services of Ronald Ross as the school's first lecturer in Tropical Medicine. The department was based in the Thompson Yates Laboratory until 1903 when the Johnston Laboratories opened. In 1902 Ross became the first British recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on malaria transmission and in the same year a separate department of Tropical Veterinary medicine was set up with a dedicated laboratory at Crofton Lodge in Runcorn to allow for the study of large animals. Other notable staff of the time included Joseph Everett Dutton who discovered one of the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness, Harold Wolferstan Thomas who developed the first effective treatment for the disease, and his collaborator Anton Breinl, who later became 'the father of tropical medicine' in Australia.