William L. Jellison was born in Kalispel, Flathead County, Montana. He received the B.S. from the University of Montana, Bozeman, in 1929, and took a position as Bacteriologist on the staff of the United States Public Health Service, Rocky Mountain Laboratory, at Hamilton, Montana. In 1931 his title was changed to Parasitologist, a title he retained until his retirement in 1960. He earned the M.S. in 1934 and the Ph.D. degree in 1940, both from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis-St. Paul. His doctoral dissertation was titled Biological studies on the faunae of nests of birds and rodents in relation to disease of animals and man. He also pursued graduate and postdoctorial studies at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Duke Universities. As a commissioned officer, first in the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) from 1941 to 1946, and later in the United States Army Reserve from 1955 to 1961, Jellison served on the USPHS mission to the Yunnan -Burma railroad (1941-1942); was an United States Army Malaria Control Officer in Assam, India (1942-1943); and served as a research associate with the United States Typhus Commission in Burma (1945); the Korean Hemorrhagic Fever Commission, United States Army, in Soeul, Korea (1953); and with the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau, Zoonosis Laboratory, Azul, Argentina (1960). In 1980 he received an honorary D.Sc. from Montana State University, and was awarded the Hoogstraal Award in 1991 by the American Committee of Medical Entomologists of the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene.
Jellison was an internationally renown parasitologist and many of his musing on epidemiology, evolution and biogeography have since been shown to be remarkably sagacious. He was active in a number of professional societies and authored or co-authored in excess of 150 scientific papers, three books and several bulletins dealing with arthropods of medical importance and/or the zoonoses transmitted by them. Although he authored or coauthored four flea taxa, his most important contributions to our knowledge of the North American flea fauna were the Indexes to the Literature of Siphonaptera of North America, a co-authored series published in 1942, 1953 and 1967.
Jellison and his wife Gretchen, who predeceased him by a few months, lived in retirement in Hamilton, Montana, just a few blocks from the Rocky Mountain Laboratory. Mrs. Jellison was a talented artist and assisted her husband by illustrating some of his many publications.
Obituary:
Flea News. 51
