
AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS 

HOSPITAL CASES OF MALARIA AMONG CANAL ZONE 
EMPLOYEES per 100 employed 
Year Case-rate Year Case-rate 
1906 81.9 192 ERE 
1907 42.6 1913 7.6 
1908 28.2 1914 6.5 
1909 21.6 1915 4.5 
1910 18.7 1916 1.5 
191] 18.4 
General Gorgas estimates that, if our force of 39,000 men had 
suffered as the French suffered from disease, there would have been 
78,000 deaths during the ten years’ work on the construction of the 
Canal. There were actually 6,630 deaths, indicating a saving due to 
efficient modern sanitation of over 70,000 lives. 
The late Charles Francis Adams said of this episode, in an 
Address before the Massachusetts Historical Society (Proceedings of 
the Massachusetts Historical Society for May, 1911), ‘‘the great and 
most startling impression left on me by what I saw on my visit to the 
Zone was not the magnificent ditch itself, nor the engineering feats 
accomplished; nor yet the construction work in progress. These are 
remarkable; but solely, so far as | am competent to judge, because of 
their magnitude and concentratedness. I have frequently seen steam 
shovels at work; though never so many, nor quite so busily, as now in 
the Culebra Cut. So I have watched pneumatic drills as they bored 
into the rock, and heard the detonation of the dynamite; though at 
Panama more drills would be working at once and in closer prox- 
imity than I ever saw before, and the blasts when the day’s work was 
done sounded like a discharge of artillery in battle. For centuries 
all civilized nations have been building canals and dams, though the 
Gatun Dam breaks the record for bigness; the locks, too, at Panama 
are larger and longer, and more elaborate and imposing than any 
yet designed. All this is true; and yet it failed deeply to impress me. 
After all, it was a mere question of bigness—the something more or 
something less; and, as a result of organized energy and systematic 
cooperation of forces for rapid daily accomplishment, I still think 
the construction of the Pacific railroads fifty years ago at the rate of 
half adozen miles a day, every material, even water, having to be 
hauled to the moving camp which constituted the advancing front,— 
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