FIGHTING YELLOW FEVER 33 



can breed, and by making use of wire-gauze to prevent 

 the access of mosquitoes to houses, bed-chambers, drains, 

 and baths, and especially to prevent not only their 

 access to, but their egress from, the rooms and beds of 

 patients already infected with disease. 



In the city of Havannah, during the American 

 occupation of Cuba (1900-1903), Colonel Gorgas 

 reduced the death-rate due to yellow fever from an 

 annual average of 751 to so small a figure as six. The 

 same energetic and faithful administrator has been 

 at work, with even more remarkable results, in the 

 canal zone of the Isthmus of Panama since 1904. The 

 attempt of the French to cut the canal was foiled 

 chiefly by yellow fever and malaria. It is estimated 

 that their effort cost quite 50,000 lives. Assisted by 

 an able and enthusiastic staff, and charged with the task 

 by a Government which comprehends the fact that the 

 really " practical men " are the men who recognise 

 science as the master (not as the negligible eccentric 

 handmaid), Colonel Gorgas has banished the mosquito 

 from his zone of occupation. As a consequence there 

 is neither malaria nor yellow fever on the Panama 

 works. In 1906 the total death-rate amongst 5,000 

 white employes on the Panama Canal works was only 

 seven in the thousand. Further, in last April the 

 daily sick-rate of the total force of about 40,000 

 people was only seventeen in the thousand. Colonel 

 Gorgas declares that there is but little sickness of any 

 kind among the Americans in the employ of the Panama 

 Commission, and that they and their wives and children 

 are fully as vigorous and robust in appearance and in 

 fact, as the same number ol people in the United States. 

 There is no reason why the centres of wealth, civilisation, 

 and population should not again be in the tropics, as 

 they were in the dawn of man's history. 



