Finlay's Mosquito Theory 

 Before and After its Official Investigation 



To the Editor of the Medical Record 1) 



Sir: In view of a remark in Dr. Reed's recent address, published in 

 the issue of the Medical Record for August 10th, stating that I might be 

 said "to have disproved my own theory", I beg to recall the essential 

 points of my mosquito theory of yellow-fever transmission, as it stood 

 three years ago, before there had been any thought of having it officially 

 or otherwise investigated. The readers of the Medical Record will thus be 

 in a position to determine whether it is likely that I should have been lured 

 by erroneous experimental results to draw such accurate conclusions as 

 mine must now be acknowledged to have been. I would also call attention 

 to the fact that, while recording my earliest ideas on some particular 

 points, Dr. Reed completely ignores several important modifications which 

 I found it necessary to introduce by reason of accumulated experience with 

 those very experiments which he now impugns, when he might easily have 

 informed himself about those modifications by consulting the three or four 

 articles which I have written and published in this journal since May, 1899. 



The essential points referred to may be summed up in the form 

 of propositions, as follows: 



1. The Culex mosquito R. D. (C. taeniatus Meigen, C. elegans Picalbi, 

 Stegomyia taeniatus Theobald, but not the C. fasciatus Fabr., for the C. 

 mosquito has no white bands on its probocis) is the particular species of 

 gnat which I have always pointed out as the one by which yellow fever 

 is normally transmitted in Havana. 



2. Since 1898, I formulated the principle that, in order to account 

 for the fact that only the C. mosquito appeared to be capable of trans- 

 mitting yellow fever, it was necessary to consider that particular species 

 as the only one (in this country) which pathogenic susceptibility for 



1) Neiv York Medical Record, Aug. 31, 1901. 



