NOTES 



William Crawford Gorgas (Sir Ronald Ross) 



The death of Gorgas at the MiHtary Hospital in Millbank on 

 July 4, 1920, removed one of the very few workers at that most 

 important and most despised branch of human effort, the 

 science and art of sanitation. He was born at Mobile, Alabama, 

 on October 3, 1854, being the son of a high officer of the Federal 

 Army, He was educated in New York and Tennessee, and 

 entered the Medical Corps of the United States Army at 

 the age of twenty-eight. When the Americans took Cuba 

 from the Spaniards he was appointed sanitary officer there, 

 and when, at the end of 1900, Reed, Carroll, Lazear, and Agri- 

 monte showed that yellow fever is carried by mosquitoes — as 

 I had previously shown malaria to be—he was instructed by 

 General Leonard Wood, himself a medical man and Com- 

 mandant of the American forces in Cuba, to attack the mos- 

 quitoes in Havanna on a large scale, I had advocated this 

 measure two years previously, but Gorgas, being supported by 

 the American Government, performed the work with great 

 success, while I had been rather opposed than helped by the 

 Governments of my own country. When the Panama Canal 

 was commenced about 1903 he was appointed head of the 

 whole sanitary and medical staff, and by his vigorous anti- 

 mosquito work was able to exclude yellow fever and malaria 

 almost entirely from the canal zone. Later he was made 

 Director-General of the American Army Medical Service — 

 because he was the most distinguished medical man in that 

 service, a thing which seldom or never happens in British 

 administration. After the war he went to various places in 

 South America to help the authorities to deal with the same 

 diseases ; and a few years ago was asked by the British authori- 

 ties to form a commission to study and prevent yellow fever 

 in West Africa, our own countrymen being excluded from this 

 task, first because they had invented the method which Gorgas 

 used, and secondly because they were Britons, Shortly 

 before his death, however, our King, who, I am glad, does not 

 share all the qualities of his subjects, offered him the honour of 

 the K.C.M.G. ; and it was when he had come to England to 

 receive this honour that he was taken ill with his last sickness. 



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