Bruce-Chwatt was educated first in Saint Petersburg, and later in Warsaw where he obtained his degree in medicine with distinction in 1930. He spent two years as RMO in the Polish Army.[3] He then took a postgraduate degree in microbiology and serology in 1933, after which he moved to France for two years to pursue a diploma in colonial medicine. He worked at the Pasteur Institute and the Hôpital Saint-Louis until the outbreak of the Second World War when he joined the Polish Army Medical Corps. He later escaped to England where he joined the Polish Rifle Brigade.[4] While serving with the Polish Army in Britain, Bruce-Chwatt earned a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and the Duncan Medal at the LSHTM.
In 1942, he was transferred to the Royal Army Medical Corps and sent to No. 7 Malaria Field Laboratory in Nigeria. He was demobilized in 1946, and began working as a medical entomologist with the Colonial Medical Service in Nigeria. In 1948, Chwatt became a British subject, married Joan Margaret Bruce and added her name to his own. In 1948, he was assigned to the RockefellerYellow Fever Research Institute in Lagos. From 1949 to 1958, as Senior Specialist (Malariologist), he organised and managed Nigeria's Federal Malaria Service.[3]
In 1958 Bruce-Chwatt became Chief of Research and Technical Intelligence in the Malaria Eradication Division of the World Health Organization in Geneva, where he remained for the next 10 years. In 1968, he joined the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as Professor of Tropical Hygiene, becoming Director of its Ross Institute the following year.[5] Upon his retirement in 1974 he joined the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science and, in 1985, the Wellcome Tropical Institute. It was during this period that he was able to indulge his long-standing interest in the history of malaria.[copyright violation?][6] Over the course of his career, Bruce-Chwatt published numerous works on malaria.
