I'KKSI DENTS ADDRESS. XC111 



before we hit the truth. Dr. Daniel Ruiz, in the presence of Dr. 

 Sternberg, who is now Surgeon-General of the United States Army, in 

 the year 1887 injected blood from the vein of a Yellow Fever patient 

 into a healthy individual to prove whether the germ was in the blood ; 

 but even that experiment was negative the germs in the eighth day 

 being destroyed in the course of the disease. Still, it did not appear 

 to be an infection carried in the air, for non-immune nurses and others 

 were very often not attacked. And the results of the malarial demon- 

 strations of 1899 stirred up the Havana Commission anew under the 

 general direction of Sternberg and the local management of Dr. Reed 

 and his staff. 



Last year Dr. Jesse W. Lazear and Dr. James Carroll, two 

 members of the Commission, allowed themselves to be bitten by 

 mosquitoes fed on a case in its early stage. Dr. Carroll was promptly 

 taken down within the incubation period of five days, and Dr. Lazear, 

 who was at first bitten by the mosquito within ten days of its feeding, 

 was not affected. But on the 12th of September last year, about a 

 month after the first experiment, he allowed a mosquito to fill itself 

 from his hand one which had been fed on a patient about a fortnight 

 before, presumably. Within five days, on the 18th of September, he 

 took ill, and on the 25th was dead. Nine other individuals voluntarily 

 allowed themselves to be experimented upon. In those cases when the 

 mosquito had bitten within eight days of their feeding there was no 

 result. The cases of infection occurred when the mosquitoes had bitten 

 more than twelve days after the feeding on the Yellow Fever patient. 

 Thus dawned the light of the facts on the Commission. Culex fasciatus 

 when fed on the blood of a Yellow Fever patient during the first few 

 days of the disease did not become capable of infecting a human subject 

 until after twelve days, or more if the weather was not very warm. 



Now arose the question : Is this the only manner in which this 

 plague is spread ? When infected ships have to remain in quarantine, 

 and all clothes and fabrics have to be burned or steamed, when patrols 

 with shot guns surround quarantined towns to prevent people flying 

 to other places, when the tremendous expense of quarantine, delay and 

 destructive disinfection is being endured, is it of any use when the 

 mosquito is allowed to fiy past the shot gun of the sentry, and past 

 the cauldron of tho disinfector, while the insignificant gnat is not even 



