Method of Stamping out Yellow Fever 

 Suggested since 1899 X) 



The possibility of stamping out yellow fever, even from its favorite 

 haunts, and the certainty of having done so, to the world's universal 

 suprise, in Havana, must now be accepted as an accomplished fact. It has 

 however taken the scientific world two and a half centuries to learn that 

 the disease is only transmitted through the bites of a certain species of 

 mosquitoes, the insects having previously become contaminated through 

 the act of biting a person suffering from the disease. This knowledge 

 constitutes the keystone of the situation, inasmuch as our success in 

 preventing the spread of yellow fever entirely depends on our ability either 

 to protect yellow fever patients from that species of mosquito, so that 

 those insects may not become infected, or else, if we have failed to do that, 

 to protect non-immunes from the infected insects. You willj naturally 

 wonder how that conclusion was ever reached, all the more so if you are 

 aware that the discovery was made at a time when there was no precedent 

 of that kind in human pathology. Passing over two and more centuries 

 of unsuccessful attempts to solve the problem, I shall now explain some 

 of the facts in which we are more nearly concerned, and which appear to 

 be but very imperfectly understood by the public at large. 



If you take up the accounts which have been given during the last 

 eighteen months in the daily press, you will naturally be under the 

 impression that although I had, many years ago, discovered that yellow 

 fever was transmitted by mosquitoes, I had never advanced any further 

 in the elucidation of that idea; so that the whole credit for the real 

 discovery and demonstration of the facts upon which our present methods 

 are based is attributed to recent investigators of my theory, namely: to 

 the members of the U. S. Yelilow Fever Commission, presided over by 

 Major Reed; to the Cuban Professor of the Havana University (formerly 

 of the University of Pennsylvania), Dr. John Guiteras; and to my 

 distinguished predecessor in the Sanitary Department of Havana, Major 

 W. C. Gorgas. Far be it from me to belittle the achievements which those 



1) Eead before the Conference of State and Provincial Boards of Health of 

 North America, at New Haven, Conn, Oct. 28, 1902. A pamphlet reprinted from Medicine. 



