XXXIII 



proved the truth of his doctrine. If he failed to convince us, 

 the faiüt was ours and not of his prevision. 



The glory of Finlay is comparable with that of Manson. 

 Working independently, the latter in Amoy, the former in 

 Havana, they laid the foundation of the doctrine of the 

 transmission of diseases by blood-sucking insects. Their 

 discoveries do not in the least detract from the merit of their 

 successors, Smith and Kilbourne, Grassi, Ross, Koch, Read, 

 Lazear, Carroll, Agramonte, Laveran, Bruce and others, as 

 the work of these cannot lessen the glory of the initiators. 



Back of these there is absolutely nothing. There is no dif- 

 ference whatever between the credence of the negroes of 

 Africa or the peasants of Italy who believed that fevers were 

 produced by the bites of mosquitos, and the writings of Nott, 

 Beauperthuy and King. He who follows these authors 

 chronologically, may imagine from the outward show of 

 scientific apparel, that he is progressing in a process of 

 evolution of a great doctrine, but he soon finds that he is 

 moving in a vicious circle that brings him back to the negroes 

 of Africa and to nothing practical. No one of them touches 

 the keystone of the problem — the transmission of a parasite 

 from the sick to the well. It may appear for a moment 

 that Dr. Beauperthuy strikes out of this circle, and that he 

 brings forward, out of the gossamer of his wild fancies a 

 fact, when he speaks of the mosquito a paites rayées de Mane, 

 the zancudo bobo. But a careful study of this work will show 

 that his mosquito was not the Stegomyia, and that he does 

 not anywhere state that it is the agent in the production of 

 yellow fever. On the contrary, he excludes this mosquito 

 because of its domestic habits, precisely the motive that 

 induced Dr. Finlay to select it as the intermediary host of the 

 yellow fever parasite. 



The Frenchman was imagining something that might 

 bring the infection from decomposing matter in swamps, the 

 Cuban saw the transmission from man to man: the former 

 was chimera, the latter was the truth. 



Our debt to Dr. Finlay is not to be found in the field of 

 yellow fever investigations alone. His inventive genius discov- 

 ered, or at least gave a practical method for the solution of the 

 problem of infantile tetanus. In the year 1903 Dr. Finlay fixed 

 bis attention on this important subject, and with admirable 

 precision had the bacteriologist, Dr. Davalos examine the 

 common wick that was generally employed for the ligature of 

 the umbilical cord. This was found to be a specially favorite 



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