NOTES ' 453 



Fortunately, His Majesty conferred the honour on him while 

 he was in hospital. 



I had corresponded with Gorgas since the beginning of this 

 century, if not before, and when the Canal was being started 

 he asked me to go to Panama to advise regarding the sanitation 

 there. I met him first as I was leaving New York for Panama 

 in the s.s. Advance on September 27, 1904, while he was home 

 on leave, and again on several occasions when he came to 

 England, especially once when we gave him a dinner in honour 

 of his work. He was a man of fine tact, and an agreeable 

 manner, and his actions were always to the point. After his 

 death there was a memorial service at St. Paul's in his honour 

 on July 9, 1920. He was Surgeon-General in the American 

 Army, and an M.D., D.Sc, LL.D. ; and had been made Director 

 of the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Institute. 

 He was buried in the United States. 



As there is much ignorance both here and in America re- 

 garding the relation of Gorgas 's work to that of other men 

 on the same lines, I thought it advisable to send a brief history 

 to The Times (July 24), giving a chronological summary of the 

 facts ; and I now think it advisable to reprint this summary 

 in Science Progress for a record — especially as the subject 

 is constantly being misstated in the British medical and lay 

 press. The truth will not diminish the great honour which 

 the world owes to Gorgas. 



The story begins long ago. The ancients were well acquainted with 

 malaria and connected it, not only with marshes, but with insects in marshes ; 

 and indeed Empedocles is said to have delivered Selinus in Sicily from it 

 by drainage about 450 B.C. Morton (1697) and Lancisi (1717) repeated these 

 speculations, and the latter studied mosquitoes in Rome, and employed 

 drainage against the disease. In 1851 and later, F. Kiichenmeister and 

 R. Leuckart proved that many of the larger parasites of men and animals 

 live, not only in one species of " host," but in two species, one of which 

 feeds on the other. In 1858-9 Leuckart suggested and Fedschenko proved 

 that the famous Guinea-Worm of man lives partly in a " water-flea " called 

 Cyclops. In 1877 P- Manson showed that another parasite of man, a Filaria, 

 which causes elephantiasis, has a similar development in a kind of mosquito — 

 but neither Fedschenko nor Manson completed the life-histories of these 

 organisms. In 1880 A. Laveran discovered that malarial fever is caused by 

 millions of minute animal parasites in the blood — not bacilli, as often stated. 

 In 1881 and later C. Finlay suggested, without proof, that the mosquito 

 called Stegomyia fasciata carries yellow fever directly from man to man by 

 its bites. In 1883 A. F. A. King recorded a number of arguments in favour 

 of his view that mosquitoes carry the infection of malaria from the marsh to 

 human beings ; and next year both A. Laveran and R. Koch suggested, 

 without citing reasons, that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. After 1885 

 C. Golgi and other Italians made classical observations on the parasites of 

 malaria ; and in 1889 T. Smith and P. L. Kilborne showed that Texas Cattle 

 Fever is due to similar organisms carried by ticks — but without actually 

 finding the former in the latter. In 1894 P. Manson added a strong argument 

 to the mosquito-theory ; certain forms of the malaria-parasites producf 



