Agreement between the History of Yellow Fever 



and its Transmission 



By the Culex Mosquito (Stegomyia of Theobald) ^ ^ 2 ) 



The early history of yellpw fever, notwithstanding the scarcity and 

 vagueness of the data referring to the first 150 years after the discovery 

 of America enables us to establish a very plausible connection between the 

 earliest undoubted epidemics of yellow fever, described by Du Tertre and by 

 Oogolludo in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, and the previous 

 ones which, under the names of "plague", "pestilence" and "malignant 

 fevers", usually attacked the newly-arrived Spaniards at Santo Domingo, 

 Terra Firma and Vera Cruz, ever since the conquest of Mexico in 1519, as 

 also between those same fevers and the "modorra-illness" or "pestilential 



1) Read on Feb. 19, 1902, before the Pan American Sanitary Congress. 

 A pamphlet. 



2) My own experiments of yellow fever inoculation, ever since 1881, when I 

 decided to submit my mosquito theory to a practical test, have always been performed 

 with the domestic day mosquito of Havana. I had previously consulted the distin- 

 guished Cuban naturalist, 1). Felipe Poey, about the classification of tlie samples wnich 

 I showed him, and the informed me that from similar samples which he had taken to 

 Paris in 1817 or 1820, the species had been named "culex mosquito" by Eobineau 

 Desvoidy. D. Felipe had previously called the insect "mosquito de Cuba" (Cuban 

 mosquito). The experiments made by Drs. Reed, Carroll, Agramonte and Lazear were 

 started in June, 1900, with a brood hatched from eggs of the identical insect which, 

 at Dr. Lazear's request, I had handed to him. All the successful experiments have 

 hitherto been made with that particular mosquito. 



From a medical point of view- it would be quite illusory to admit, a priori, that 

 other mosquitoes, whose external and functional characteristics differ materially from 

 those of the culex mosquito of Desvoidy, share with the latter the faculty of trans- 

 mitting yellow fever, even though they should happen to belong — from the naturalist 's 

 standpoint — to a common group or species, such as the Stegomyia fasciata, of Theobald. 



So far as I can judge from the written descriptions by former classifiers, the 

 culex mosquito (Desv.) culex tcniatus (Wied.), and culex elegans (Fie) represent but 

 one ideiiti.'.il insect, and must therefore be considered as the "yellow-fever mosquito". 

 About the other synonyms included in the Stegomyia fasciata species, in the absence 

 of direct experiments of inoculation, the faculty of sexual reproduction between males 

 and females classed under different headings, should be resorted to before prejudging 

 their capability of transmitting the disease. 



