YELLOW
FEVER
Save
for a tiny insect known as the Stegomyia fasciata the country
relinquishing control of the Panama Canal in 1999 might well have
been France. Stegomyia fasciata (also known as Aedes aegypti)
is a mosquito, and it was as much this bug as financial skullduggery
and technological shortcomings that defeated Ferdinand de Lesseps'
attempt to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Some 20,000
workers, or one-third of the labor force, died during the French
attempt to dig the canal in 1881-1889.
The
mosquito carried yellow fever—the deadly "yellow jack" that had
long run up death rates in Latin America, and among North Americans
living or traveling there. Its victims included even Thomas Nast,
the famed cartoonist, struck down after becoming consul general
in Ecuador.
The
yellow jack first became a major problem for the United States
in the wake of the Spanish-American War. Troops occupying Cuba
found themselves devastated by the disease, which attacks the
liver, turning the skin yellow, raising the body temperature,
and making victims violently ill before lapsing into a usually
fatal coma. Even survivors were often left damaged for life, and
no one had come close to finding a cure. No one was even sure
what caused the disease, or how it spread.
The
U.S. Army had one: Major Walter Reed, and the four-man commission
of doctors he headed. Their solution was one of the bravest in
the histories of both medical science and the United States Armed
Forces. It was to test the disease on their own bodies.
It
had long been intuited by an eccentric, European-Cuban doctor,
Carlos Finlay, that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes—a theory
widely ridiculed in more conventional medical circles. Reed, his
fellow doctors, and a detachment of regular soldiers who volunteered
from the ranks, decided to put Finlay's theories to the test.
They would allow themselves to be bitten by mosquitoes that had
previously fed on yellow fever victims.
Dr.
James Carroll was first, letting an infected mosquito bite him
on August 27, 1900. He fell ill with the disease but survived—barely.
His colleague, Dr. Jesse William Lazear, died of the yellow jack
on September 25—leaving behind a young wife and child. Reed himself,
like Carroll, sustained lasting damage to his health from the
tests.
The
regular soldiers were just as valiant. To a man, they refused
the $250 payments offered them, feeling that the money would cheapen
their endeavor on behalf of all humanity. A deeply moved Reed
saluted them: "Gentlemen, I salute you."
The
United States Congress was less moved. For many years it denied
a pension to one of the soldiers, Pvt. John R. Kissinger, even
though he was paralyzed in the experiments. Even by 1925, the
combined monthly payments to Kissinger, and to the widows of Reed,
Lazear, and Carroll, was only $475. Meanwhile, American newspapers
generally mocked the volunteers' efforts when they noticed them
at all, insisting in their ignorance that there must be a vaccine
for the fever, and demanding that one be developed immediately.
Yet
the doctors and the soldiers succeeded. They established not only
that the mosquitoes spread the yellow jack, but that they did
it over a particular cycle: picking up the disease only in the
first three days that an infected patient had it; taking another
12 days after that to incubate it in their tiny bodies, before
it became infectious.
Discovering
the source of the disease was one thing; eradicating it another.
That task fell to sturdy Major William Crawford Gorgas, who took
on the incredible task of eliminating mosquito breeding grounds
by disposing of all standing freshwater in Havana. Somehow, he
did it; by 1901, there was not one case of yellow fever in the
entire city.
Taking
note of his work, chief engineer John Stevens brought Major Gorgas
over to the isthmus in 1905—though it took an appeal to President
Theodore Roosevelt himself to get him. Once, in Panama, Gorgas
not only eradicated the Stegomyia in the Canal Zone, but also
another mosquito that spread malaria, and rats that carried bubonic
plague. By 1914, Panama had a death rate from yellow jack that
was only half that of the United States, the canal was built,
and Dr. Reed and his volunteers had done an enormous service for
the world.
American
Greats Edited by Robert A. Wilson & Stanley Marcus
Public Affairs Press, a member of the Perseus Group
