
AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS 

spread of yellow fever—it was all an unfathomable mystery—but 
today the curtain has been drawn’’; and later on New Year’s Eve— 
“only ten minutes more of the old century remain. Here have I 
been sitting reading that most wonderful book, ‘La Roche on 
Yellow Fever, written in 1853. Forty-seven years later it has been 
permitted to me and my assistants to lift the impenetrable veil that 
has surrounded the causation of this most wonderful, dreadful pest 
of humanity and to put it on a rational and scientific basis. I thank 
God that this has been accomplished during the latter days of the 
old century. May its cure be brought out in the early days of the 
new. 
The practical result of this discovery was immediate and striking. 
In the half century or so for which we have records, yellow fever 
had killed an average of 750 persons a year in the City of Havana. 
The sanitary reforms introduced by the American army of occupa- 
tion which produced good results in reducing typhoid and smallpox 
had been powerless against yellow fever because its cause was as yet 
a mystery. Following immediately on the experiments at Camp 
Lazear, on February 15, 1901, a campaign was begun on the new 
lines indicated, by screening the rooms occupied by yellow fever 
patients and destroying all mosquitoes in the neighborhood. Asa 
result there were six deaths in the City of Havana during the year 1901 
as against 305 in the preceding year, and although sporadic cases have 
been introduced from other localities, yellow fever has never again 
established itself in Havana. The scourge of centuries was wiped 
out in a single year. 
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