July 15, 1920] 



NATURE 



62 



The results achieved induced Gorgas to put 

 forward the theory, advanced also by Sambon and 

 others, that if insanitary conditions are removed 

 the vv^hite man can not only live and labour in 

 the tropics, but also propagate his race there, and 

 that his descendants will be Healthy and virile. 

 It is too early yet to say that this is wholly the 

 case, but it is interesting to note what Gorgas 

 said about this important question. Speaking of 

 his work, he wrote : — 



The real scope of tropical sanitation, which has 

 been almost entirely developed within the last fifteen 

 or twenty years, 1 believe, will extend far beyond our 

 work at Panama. Everywhere in the tropics to which 

 the United States has gone in the past fifteen years 

 it has been shown that the white man can live and 

 exist in good health. This has occurred in the Philip- 

 pines, in Cuba, and in Panama, but the demonstra- 

 tion has been most prominent and spectacular at 

 Panama, and therefore has attracted there the greatest 

 world-wide attention. Here among our large force 

 of labourers we had for ten years some ten thousand 

 Americans — men, women, and children. Most of 

 these American men did hard manual labour, exposed 

 to the sun, rain, and weather conditions day in and 

 day out, yet during that time their health remained 

 perfectly good, just as good as if they were working 

 at home. The same remark as to health would apply 

 to the four thousand women and children who lived 

 at Panama wMth their husbands and fathers. Both 

 the women and children remained in as good condi- 

 tion as they would have been had they lived in the 

 United States. This condition at Panama, I think, 

 will be generally received as a demonstration that the 

 white man can live and thrive in the tropics. The 

 amount of wealth which can be produced in the 

 tropics for a given amount of labour is so much 

 larger than that which can be produced in the tein- 

 perate zone by the same amount of labour that the 

 attraction for the white man to emigrate to the 

 tropics will be very great when it is appreciated that 

 he can be made safe as to his health conditions at a 

 small expense. When the great valleys of the Amazon 

 and of the Congo are occupied by a white population 

 more food will be produced in these regions than is 

 now produced in all the rest of the inhabited world. 



Panama made Gorgas famous ; the Royal 

 Society awarded him its Buchanan medal ; the 

 University of Oxford made him an honorary 

 D.Sc. ; the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine 

 presented him with its Mary Kingsley medal ; and 

 he was not forgotten in America. He did not, 

 however, rest upon his oars. In 191 3 the Chamber 

 of Mines at Johannesburg sought his advice as 

 regards the prevention of pneumonia among 

 native miners on the Rand, and he proceeded to 

 South Africa and carried out an investigation 

 which led to useful results. He then turned his 

 attention to South .\merica, for the dream of his 

 life — and no vain dream — was to stamp yellow 

 fever out of the world. He made a survey of 

 the endemic foci in South America, and then 

 started to obliterate the worst of them at Guaya- 

 quil, in Ecuador. Here, again, his efforts and 

 those of his assistants were crowned with success, 

 and it is a tribute to his tact and discretion that 

 so much could be accomplished in one of the 

 NO. 2646, VOL. 105] 



lands of mafiana^ as some of the Spanish South 

 American republics may be not inaptly called. 



As director of the International Health Board 

 of the Rockefeller Institute, a post to which he 

 was appointed on the completion of the Panama 

 Canal, Gorgas had excellent facilities for travel 

 and investigation, and he became an apostle, as 

 well as a priest, of the goiidess Hygeia. As 

 Surgeon-General of the United States Army, he 

 had to organise the medical service for the Great 

 War, and during the war he visited both France 

 and Serbia, retiring, however, from the United 

 States Army in 1918 under the age-rule. 



Scarcely had hostilities ceased when his atten- 

 tion turned again to yellow fever, and along with 

 Surgeon-Gen. Noble and T)r. Guiteras, of 

 Havana, he was, as stated, on his way to the 

 African West Coast, when he was stricken down 

 by what proved to be a fatal illness. On his sick 

 bed he was visited by the King, who conferred 

 a K.C.M.G. upon him, and just before he took 

 ill, when he was in Brussels at the Congress of 

 the Royal Institute of Public Health, he was pre- 

 sented with the Harben gold medal, while at the 

 recent annual meeting of the British Medical 

 Association the University of Cambridge con- 

 ferred upon him its honorary LL.D. 



Gorgas died full of honours, if not of years. 

 His work received its rightful recognition, and 

 if he died comparatively early it must be remem- 

 bered that his life was a very strenuous one, spent 

 to a large extent in hot climates, and that he 

 came very near to realising his lifelong ambition. 



He was a man of resource and courage, but he 

 was also a man with a kindly heart and a gratify- 

 ing sense of humour. He knew how to handle 

 those serving under him, and how to get the best 

 out of them, while he gave credit where credit 

 was due. 



It has been said of him, sometimes bluntly, 

 sometimes even rudely, that, in the strict sense 

 of the term, he was not a scientific worker, but 

 the fact remains that Gorgas worked ever on 

 strictly scientific lines, and that the moment a 

 scientific truth had been enunciated he was up 

 and doing in order to apply it for the welfare of 

 mankind. Without men of his stamp the labour 

 of the microscopists would to a large extent be 

 futile. His art was the natural corollary of the 

 laboratory, and no more efficient exponent of it 

 can be imagined. 



As his coffin, shrouded by "Old Glory," borne 

 by stalwart British Guardsmen, flanked by British 

 medical officers of high rank, and followed by his 

 widow and a distinguished company, passed up 

 the aisle of St. Paul's, it was in keeping with his 

 life's work that, amongst the wreaths waiting to 

 be placed upon it, was one sent as a token of 

 .remembrance and esteem by his friend Sir Patrick 

 Manson. 



