XXXIV 



nidus for tetanus bacilli. In that same year Dr. Finlay 

 conceived his idea of the aseptic package for the treatment of 

 the umbilical cord. This package has since been given out 

 gratis to the poor by the Health Department of Cuba with the 



result that the mortality from infantile tetanus has fallen 

 in an 1313 in the year 1902 to 576 in 1910. 



Dr. Finlay's capacity for work is extraordinary. In the 

 midst of the labors of active practice, and the frequent produc- 

 tion of papers on various medical subjects in which he 

 generally proves himself to be ahead of his compatriots, 

 as may be seem in his writings on filaría and cholera, he 

 would find time, for instance, to decipher an old Latin 

 manuscript, with the necessary gathering of data from 

 historic, heraldic, and philologic sources, to prove that the 

 old Bible in -which the manuscript appears was owned 

 by the emperor Charles Y. ; or he takes up problems in the 

 higher mathematics, in chess, in philology; or he elaborates 

 complicated and original theories of the cosmos in which 

 the spiral oscillating motion, and the properties of colloid 

 substances play an important part. More recently, in 

 the midst of the harassing occupations of a great adminis- 

 trative office, and when he had passed his seventieth year, 

 he masters the complicated subject of immunity ami the 

 theories of Metchnikoff, Ehrlich, Buchner and others, 

 presenting his own conception of the intricate problem. 



Very recently, in 1907, his appointment to represent Cuba 

 in the Berlin meeting of the Congress of Hygiene and 

 Demography, which he did not attend, spurred the old 

 energies to the revival of studies upon the influence of 

 temperature upon the spread of yellow fever through its action 

 on the habits of the mosquito. This Avas the last production 

 before the gifted mind began to cloud in 1909. 



The great work of Finlay may be expressed in very few 

 words: he discovered the fact that yellow fever is transmitted 

 by the bite of one species of mosquito, and he invented a sure 

 method for the extinction of the disease. On contemplating 

 the benefits that humanity has reaped from the labors of our 

 compatriot we were led to exelain at the meeting of our last 

 Medical Congress: "Great as our satisfaction must be, how 

 much greater must be that of the man, illustrious as he is 

 modest, who has made all this possible through a mental 

 effort equalled by very few in the history of the human 

 mind." 



