September 23.—By the death in London of Surgeon-General William C. Gorgas, U. 8. A., the nation and the world lost the one man who most fully embodied for the popular imagination the modern mastery of disease by science. His name is linked for all time with the suppression of yellow fever and malaria in the Panama Canal Zone; for he directed the work and made noble use of the body of knowledge established by the researches of Finlay, Reed, Carroll, Agramonti, and Lazear.
We quote from the "Scientific Monthly" for August a summary of General Gorgas's achievements in the field of preventive medicine:
"He was graduated from the University of the South and from the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, and became an army surgeon in 1880. He saw service in Florida, in the West, and on the Mexican border, and had risen to the rank of major in 1898, when he was with the expedition against Santiago. Thence he was sent to Havana to be the chief sanitary officer of that city during the American occupation.
"Cuba was a centre of yellow fever and Dr. Carlos Finlay, of Havana, had proposed the theory that mosquitoes were the carriers. The truth of this theory was proved and many of the conditions of infection determined by the American Army Commission, consisting of Reed, Carroll, Agramonti, and Lazear. Immediately following this investigation and based upon its scientific findings, Gorgas succeeded in practically eliminating yellow fever in Havana and throughout the island.
Congress, in recognition of this work, in 1903, by special act made him colonel and assistant surgeon-general, and then, a year later, he was sent ta Panama, becoming! chief sanitary officer of the Canal Zone, in 1904, and a member of the Canal Commission in 1907. In the days of the old French company, which attempted to build the Panama Canal, tropical diseases annually claimed one-fourth of all its workers. The French were powerless before this pestilence. When Gorgas became general sanitary officer of the Canal Commission: the annual death toll had been reduced, but it was still difficult to obtain the vast army of workmen necessary and to care for those disabled by malaria, yellow fever, and dysentery. In" nine years, by a systematic campaign for the destruction of the mosquito as the carrying agent of disease, and by other sanitary measures, Gorgas virtually drove these diseases from the Isthmus. When he gave up the work, deaths among the Canal workers had been re-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.