Carlos Juan Finlay and Yellow Fever

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Way back in twenty fourteen, we did an episode on
Walter Reed, which we reran as a Saturday Classic maybe
three ish years ago. Walter Reed was a US Army
physician who was most known for his work on illnesses
that were really affecting soldiers in the Caribbean, especially yellow fever.

(00:37):
In that episode, we talked about how Reid's work was
really based on that of a Cuban doctor named Carlos
Wan Finlay. I'm going to take a pronunciation moment here,
because I think a lot of people in English speaking
countries pronounced that name, which is spelled fi n Lay,
as Finley. But everything I found from an institute named

(01:00):
after him, and some things from Spanish speakers in Cuba
pronounced it more like Finlay, So that's what we are
going with. So Finlay had already figured out a lot
of what Reid and his team confirmed, and then we're
pretty much given credit for I've always wanted to talk
more about Finlay, and now we are finally Juan Carlos

(01:20):
Finlay was born on December third, eighteen thirty three. He
was born in Camaguay in central Cuba, which was at
the time known as Santa Maria del Puerto del Principe.
He went by Carlos, and later on in his life
started using j as his middle initial to differentiate from
his son, Carlos Eduardo Finlay, who became an accomplished doctor

(01:43):
and professor of medicine in his own right.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Carlos's parents were both immigrants to Cuba. His mother, Elizabeth
Debard known as Eliza, was a frenchwoman from Trinidad. His father,
Edward Finlay, was from Scotland. In the words of a
biographic sketch by Cuban physician and yellow fever specialist, doctor
Juan Guitaris, which was published in nineteen twelve, quote like

(02:08):
to one other great Antillion, Alexander Hamilton, he was born
of two great races, the Scotch and the French, a
quote I included in this episode because it made me
laugh so hard when I read it for the first time.
Guteras also had this to say about Finley's personality and
what his parents' nationalities had to do with it quote

(02:31):
from the Scotch he inherited the intensity and the ardor
in the pursuit of an objective, together with the logic discipline,
and the inclination to theorize upon and insistently to discuss
abstruse subjects without losing, however, the golden thread of their
practical application. From the French, he received his characteristic amiability

(02:52):
and courtesy, together with a lively imagination and the love
of glory, which, though not apparent on the surface, must
have spurred the scotchman in his noble ambition. I feel
like this is attributing a lot of stuff to his
behavior that really we have no scientific basis for. But
according to Gutanez, that was tempered by quote the most

(03:16):
exquisite modesty, a virtue which I am pleased to think
was fostered in the creole atmosphere of the time, together
with a great love for the land of his birth.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, I really feel like that quote is a combination
of a description of his personality and an example of
how much people thought a national origin could affect.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
A person's character.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
So at first, when Carlos was a child, he was
educated at home, and when he was eleven, his parents
sent him to a school in France. His father was
a doctor and wanted him to have access to a
prestigious European education, but that education wound up having a
lot of interruptions. First, Carlos got sick. Most accounts described

(04:05):
this as Korea, possibly Sydenham Korea, which is a movement
disorder that can develop in children after they've had an
illness like strep throat or scarlet fever. This affected his speech,
and after Carlos got home, his father developed a regimen
to try to help him recover, and it did help.
For the rest of his life, Carlos spoke slowly and

(04:28):
his speech could sound slurred, which sometimes affected people's perceptions
of his intelligence. Gueteris also suggested that this speech disorder
came from Carlos's brain and might have been connected to
his seeming perpetually absent minded. Carlos went back to France
when he was fifteen, but before long he had to

(04:49):
leave again due to the Revolution of eighteen forty eight,
which overthrew France's constitutional monarchy. Carlos went to London for
a while and then spent a year's stay being in
Germany before going back to France and enrolling in college
in Rouen. Then in eighteen fifty one, he faced yet
another interruption when he contracted typhoid fever and had to

(05:12):
once again go back home to Cuba to recover. By
this point, Finlay was fluent in Spanish, English, German, and French,
and he knew enough classical Latin and Greek to translate
works in those languages into Spanish for fun. His coursework
in Europe was equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts, and
he had reached a point in his education that, once

(05:34):
he recovered, the next step would be medical school. But
the medical school at the University of Havana would not
accept these credentials, so Finlay went to Philadelphia to attend
Jefferson Medical College, earning his medical degree on March tenth,
eighteen fifty five. His professors and mentors encouraged him to

(05:55):
go to New York and work with the Spanish speaking
immigrant community there, but he wanted to go back to Cuba.
He did, and Spanish authorities validated his medical degree and
approved him to practice medicine there in eighteen fifty seven.
Finlay didn't establish a permanent practice in Cuba right away.

(06:16):
He went back to France for a while to continue
his education in neurology and ophthalmology. He and his father
also went to Peru together and they practiced medicine there.
On October sixteenth, eighteen sixty five, Carlos married a woman
named Adella, who was from Trinidad. They would go on
to have three children together, Carlos Eduardo in eighteen sixty eight,

(06:38):
Jorge Enrique in eighteen seventy and Jose Maria Francisco in
eighteen seventy six.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
In eighteen sixty nine, the family went to Trinidad to
visit Adella's family. According to Keetera's biographical sketch, in eighteen
seventy five, Carlos also went to New York Quote in
search of professional advice for Missus Finlay, which suggests that
she was having a medical issue and that he wanted
to consult a specialist, but Gauteris doesn't suggest what that

(07:07):
issue may have been. At the beginning of his medical career,
including while he was practicing outside of Cuba, Finlay focused
on general medicine along with ophthalmology and eye surgery, but
by the eighteen sixties he was focusing more on diseases
that were public health issues in Cuba, including yellow fever,
which is a viral hemorrhagic fever. Most people who contract

(07:32):
yellow fever have symptoms like fever, chills, body aches, nausea, vomiting,
and weakness, and they recover within three or four days.
But about fifteen percent of people who contract yellow fever
develop a serious illness that has a much higher fever
and organ damage jaundice, hemorrhaging, and black vomit caused by

(07:52):
that hemorrhaging and organ destruction. Still today, as many as
fifty percent of people who defy this more serious version
of the disease die within seven to ten days. Today,
we know that yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes, especially
Ades agypdi, which thrives in warm climates and is native

(08:15):
to Africa. These mosquitoes were introduced to the Caribbean and
the Americas through the Transatlantic slave trade, and the first
reports of yellow fever in the Americas were in the
seventeenth century. The disease soon became endemic in tropical areas
that had a large enough population for sustained transmission. It

(08:36):
also caused huge, devastating outbreaks in places outside the tropics,
as mosquitoes and sick passengers arrived aboard ships. In the
United States, there were frequent outbreaks in the South, but
they could happen in the North as well. For example,
about ten percent of the people living in Philadelphia died

(08:56):
in the yellow fever outbreak in seventeen ninety three.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yellow fever also became a particular problem for Spanish colonial
authorities and the Spanish military in Cuba. Spain had claimed
Cuba as its territory in fourteen ninety two and started
establishing settlements there in the fifteen hundreds. Cuba's indigenous population
included multiple Ariwuacans speaking peoples, and they faced displacement, introduced diseases, violence,

(09:25):
and genocide. Indigenous people and enslaved Africans rose up against
the Spanish in Cuba for decades, and in eighteen sixty
eight an anti colonial uprising began that came to be
known as the Ten Years War, and this war was
interconnected with the movement to abolished slavery.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
Large numbers of Spanish soldiers were sent to Cuba to
put down this uprising, and they were vulnerable not just
to yellow fever, but to a range of other tropical diseases.
That their immune systems had no experience with. They were
also housed in close quarters, making it easy for infected
mosquitoes to bite multiple people. This contributed to the spread

(10:07):
of other diseases, including malaria, which is also spread by mosquitoes,
and typhus, which is spread by fleas and lace.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
Serious illnesses became an enormous problem for the Spanish military,
with death rates that were much much higher among soldiers
than they were among the civilian Cuban population. That continued
to be true after the Ten Years were ended in
eighteen seventy eight, including during the Cuban War of Independence
that started in eighteen ninety five. More than ninety percent

(10:41):
of the deaths among Spanish troops between eighteen ninety five
and eighteen ninety eight were due to disease, not combat injuries,
and more than a third of those deaths were from
yellow fever. Maximo Gomezi Bayez, leader of the Cuban Liberation
Army during the Ten Years War and the Cuban War
of Independence, described June, July and August as his best generals.

(11:07):
Those were the months when many of these diseases peaked
and the months when mosquitoes were most active.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
But at the time they didn't know that mosquitoes were
spreading the illness. The person who figured out the mosquito
part was Carlos Swan Finlay. We will talk about that
after a sponsor break. The focus in today's episode is

(11:36):
yellow fever. But in addition to his postgraduate training in ophthalmology,
Carlos Wan Finlay also studied and wrote on a range
of other illnesses that were affecting people in Cuba. One
was cholera. In eighteen sixty seven, he suggested that the
source of a cholera outbreak was sewage contamination of a
water supply. Over the course of his work, he also

(11:58):
published papers on touberculosis, tetanus, leprosy, nutritional diseases like barry berry,
and parasitic diseases like trichinosis and philariasis. He was writing
about yellow fever by eighteen sixty five. Finlay developed a
thorough knowledge of the late nineteenth centuries medical understanding of

(12:19):
yellow fever. He also studied the air in Havana, measuring
its alkalinity and cross referencing that with the seasons, the climate,
and public health. He noticed that the air seemed to
be more alkaline in times when yellow fever outbreaks peaked,
and he thought there might be some kind of connection there.
In eighteen seventy nine, after the end of the Ten Years' War,

(12:42):
the United States sent a commission of doctors to Cuba
to study yellow fever in the US. Interest in the
disease was primarily connected to those unpredictable and horrifying outbreaks
that struck American cities. A huge outbreak had struck more
than one hundred cities and towns in the southern US
the year before. Because of his reputation and his previous

(13:06):
work on yellow fever, Finlay was appointed to work with
the US commission. They did not pinpoint the cause of
yellow fever or correctly identify how it was spread, but
this work did connect Finlay to US Army physician and
bacteriologist George Miller Sternberg, the commission's microscopist. Finlay and Sternberg

(13:26):
became friends, and Sternberg shared his collection of slides containing
blood and tissue samples from yellow fever patients with Finlay.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
The commission's report concluded that the infectious agent that caused
yellow fever had to be replicating somewhere outside of human
bodies before it infected them. I could not get my
hands on this actual report, but that is how it
was characterized.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
In other writing about it.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Finlay had also learned about a type of corn rust
that had to incubate in barberry bushes before it could
infect the corn. That combined with his microscopic study of
Sternberg's blood and tissue samples and what the blood cells
and vessels looked like in those samples, he started to
wonder if yellow fever could be introduced into the body

(14:15):
through the bite of an insect. By eighteen eighty one,
Finley was confident that yellow fever was being spread by mosquitoes,
specifically the females of the species known as ads agypdi. Today,
it has had multiple other scientific names at various points
in the past, so if you do additional reading, you
may see that species name differently. But on February eighteenth

(14:38):
of eighteen eighty one, he presented at the International Sanitary
Conference in Washington, d C. And he said that he
believed an intermediate agent played a role in yellow fever transmission.
He said that he was not yet ready to say
what that intermediate agent was, but that he was working
on a paper about it. This presentation was not received

(15:01):
very well. He had been selected to attend this conference
without a lot of notice, so he hadn't had time
to really do a lot of experiments to verify what
he had concluded based on his observations so far. Even
though he was sure that the mosquito was the vector
in question, he did not want to make that announcement

(15:22):
without evidence to support it. Nobody from the audience asked
him many questions about his presentation, but apparently somebody did
tell him that he needed to follow Robert Coke's postulates,
including isolating the organism in question, culturing it, and confirming
that it caused disease in a healthy subject.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
This would have been impossible at the time. Coke's postulates
were developed through study of bacterial illnesses like anthrax and tuberculosis,
which could be filtered, cultured, and observed through a microscope.
Yellow fever is caused by a virus, and viruses could
not be filtered, cultured, or seen using the technologies that

(16:05):
were in existence at the time. People did not yet
know that viruses existed.

Speaker 2 (16:11):
On August fourteenth, eighteen eighty one, Finlay delivered a paper
titled the mosquito hypothetically considered as the transmitting agent of
yellow fever before the Havanah Academy of Sciences. In it,
he referenced Sterberg's tissue samples quote showing what to me
appeared to be a most striking feature, namely that the

(16:34):
red blood globules are discharged unbroken in the hemorrhages of
yellow fever. This fact, taken in connection with the circumstance
that those hemorrhages are often unattended with any perceptible break
in the blood vessels, while on the other hand, they
constitute a most essential clinical symptom of the disease, led

(16:54):
me to infer that the principal lesion of yellow fever
should be sought for or in the vascular endothelium. The
disease is transmissible, It attacks but once the same person,
and always presents in its phenomena a regular order comparable
with that observed in the eruptive fevers, all of which

(17:16):
circumstances suggested to my mind the hypothesis that yellow fever
should be considered as a sort of eruptive fever, in
which the seat of the eruption is the vascular endothelium.
He walked through what was needed for yellow fever to
be transmitted.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
Quote. One the existence of a yellow fever patient into
whose capillaries the mosquito is able to drive its sting
and to impregnate it with the virulent particles at an
appropriate stage of the disease. Two, That the life of
the mosquito be spared after its bite upon the patient
until it has a chance of biting the person in

(17:54):
whom the disease is to be reproduced. Three the coincidence
that some of the person whom the same mosquito happens
to bite thereafter shall be susceptible of contracting the disease.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
He also explained the mosquito's physiology and behavior and how
they facilitated the spread of yellow fever. He described the
experiments that he had conducted in which he allowed a
mosquito to bite a yellow fever patient and then later
bite someone who had never had yellow fever. This seemed
to lead to mild cases of yellow fever, and several

(18:28):
of his test subjects were diagnosed with quote abortive yellow fever,
but most of his test subjects didn't develop any kind
of symptoms quote barring my first three inoculated men. No
other case of confirmed or abortive yellow fever has occurred
among the twenty non immunes whom I have had under observation.

Speaker 1 (18:50):
He also very clearly understood that his conclusions would be controversial,
wrote quote, I understand but too well, that nothing less
than an absolutely in controvertible demonstration will be required before
the generality of my colleagues accept a theory so entirely
at variance with the ideas which have until now prevailed

(19:10):
about yellow fever. The prevailing idea about yellow fever at
this point was that it was spread through fomites, that is,
inanimate objects or materials that could carry infectious agents. And
when it came to yellow fever, especially severe hemorrhagic cases
of yellow fever, this idea made so much sense. Since

(19:31):
yellow fever is a hemorrhagic disease. Patients bled and they vomited,
their linens, the medical equipment and the rooms where they
were being treated became soiled, and the nature of that
contamination was just viscerally horrifying. So a big part of
attempts to control the spread of yellow fever was relentless

(19:52):
aggressive cleaning and disinfection of those spaces. So Finley's hypothesis
about mosquito wasn't just going against the prevailing medical knowledge
about yellow fever. If he was correct, it also meant
that the one thing people felt like they could do
to control yellow fever was wrong, and all the time

(20:13):
and money and effort that had been spent on disinfecting
linens and scrubbing hospital walls and floors had been essentially useless.
In eighteen eighty one, there was also only one other
disease that had been identified as being spread by insects,
a parasitic infection called phileriasis, although the transmission of that
was not fully understood until nineteen oh one. People just

(20:37):
did not think of insect born diseases as a real possibility.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
So Finley's conclusions were not just dismissed, they were ridiculed.
People started calling him the Mosquito man. Other researchers in
Cuba excluded him from their work. That included Juan Santos Fernandez,
who established and funded a Histobacteriological life Laboratory and Institute
of Rabies Vaccination in eighteen eighty five. In addition to

(21:06):
dismissing Finlay's work, Santos Fernandez hired Diego Tamayo, who was
another vocal critic of Finlay's, to head up that institute's
yellow fever research. This dismissal and derision continued after Finlay
did more research and published yellow Fever its Transmission by
Means of the Culex Mosquito in the American Journal of

(21:29):
the Medical Sciences in eighteen eighty six. This was obviously
both personally and professionally crushing. It shook Finley's faith in
the broader scientific and medical community. It was true that
his conclusions had come from his observations and limited experiments
on volunteers, not through rigorous, controlled studies or following Cooke's postulates,

(21:53):
but he was also confident that his conclusions were correct
and that they were worth examining further.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
Finlay's wife was a big source of support. Another was
Claudio Delgado, a doctor from Spain who was Finlay's friend
and colleague and continued to work with him through all
of this.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
They lobbied for the establishment of another bacteriological research facility
dedicated specifically to finding the cause of yellow fever. Again,
viruses still had not been discovered yet, which is why
their focus was still on bacteria.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Their efforts to establish a new research center were unsuccessful,
but Finley continued to gather supporting evidence for his hypothesis
through one hundred and two experiments on human volunteers, most
of them were new arrivals to Cuba, including soldiers and
Catholic clergy. He had the cooperation of Jesuit and Carmelite

(22:47):
fathers working in Cuba, and of Captain General Ramon Blanco,
who was a brigadier general and colonial administrator. A lot
of writing about this research, including the way we described
it in our episode on read Misses something really important.
Finlay is characterized as not understanding that it takes roughly

(23:07):
two weeks for the yellow fever virus to replicate in
a mosquito's body before it can cause serious illness, and
that's why most of his experiments did not result in
patients who had full blown yellow fever. This is presented
as a reason why people were not taking him seriously.
He was waiting only long enough for the mosquito to

(23:28):
digest the infected blood it had consumed, then to be
hungry again. This only took about four days, so his
experimental subjects typically did not get very sick. If they
showed any symptoms at all, but he was not trying
to give people full blown yellow fever.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
He was using these mosquito bites as an inoculation, much
like intentionally exposing someone to cowpox, which is a mild disease,
to make them immune smellpox, and.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
The subjects did seem to have resistance to yellow fever
after being bitten. In eighteen ninety one, Finlay published Inoculations
for Yellow Fever by Means of Contaminated Mosquitoes in the
American Journal of the Medical Sciences. In this paper, he
rebutted some of the criticism of his earlier work, and

(24:20):
he also presented the results of a study of sixty
seven volunteers who were monitored for three or more years
after being bitten by a mosquito that was infected with
yellow fever. During that three year period, they lived in
parts of central Havana where there were frequent yellow fever outbreaks.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
This observation was still ongoing, so fifteen of them hadn't
gotten to that three year mark yet, but they also
had not had any indication of contracting yellow fever. Twelve
had developed a fever within twenty five days of being
bitten by the mosquito, and they either had or had
not had albumen in their urine, which is a sign

(24:59):
of yellow Twelve of them had no symptoms at all
after being bitten, and also no other yellow fever symptoms
in the three years since then. Twenty four of them
had no symptoms after being bitten and then had a
mild fever sometime in the three years afterward, but no
other sign of yellow fever beyond that. Three had no

(25:21):
symptoms after being bitten and then later got yellow fever
but recovered, and then one had no symptoms after being bitten,
but then later on got yellow fever and died. Outsiders
who came to Cuba were described as acclimated once they
no longer seemed susceptible to the tropical diseases that were

(25:41):
endemic there. Usually that happened after repeated illnesses, at least
some of them serious. By Findley's calculations, ninety two point
two percent of these test subjects were acclimated to yellow
fever by being bitten by a mosquito in this experiment,
having at most very much symptoms that acclamation was the goal,

(26:04):
not a full blown case of a potentially deadly disease.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
We'll talk about.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
How Walter Reid wound up being given a lot of
the credit for the discovery that mosquito spread yellow fever.
After a sponsor break in eighteen ninety three, Carlos Juan
Finlay and Claudio Delgado started collaborating with some of the

(26:32):
researchers from Juan Santos Fernandez's institute.

Speaker 1 (26:36):
At that point, Diego Tomayo.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
Had resigned, and while Santos Fernandez was not a believer
in Finlay's ideas, there were less objections to working with him.
That continued until eighteen ninety five. With the start of
the Cuban War of Independence. Medical and scientific research really
struggled during the war. In addition to the typical risks

(27:01):
and hardships of war, a lot of Cuban doctors and
researchers started leaving for the United States.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
The US became directly involved in this war between Cuba
and Spain in eighteen ninety eight, after Congress issued resolutions
supporting Cuban independence and demanded a withdrawal of Spanish troops,
Spain declared war on the US, which then declared war
on Spain, and from the US point of view, this
part of it is known as the Spanish American War.

(27:31):
Finlay was in Tampa, Florida, when the US declared war
on Spain, and he traveled to Washington, d c. To
volunteer his service as a surgeon. He was sent back
to Cuba aboard a hospital ship. He was sixty four
at this point.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
The Spanish American War ended with a treaty signed in
Paris on December tenth, eighteen ninety eight. Under this treaty,
Spain seated the islands of Guam and Puerto Rico to
the United States, and the US purchased the Philippines from
Spain for twenty million dollars. This treaty also guaranteed Cuba's independence,

(28:07):
with the United States temporarily occupying Cuba and establishing a
military government. The US occupation lasted from the end of
the war until Cuba became formally independent in nineteen oh two.
George Miller Sternberg, the microscopist who had become Finlay's friend
and colleague back in eighteen seventy nine, was now the

(28:28):
surgeon General of the Army, and the US Army faced
the exact same issues with yellow fever and other tropical
diseases as the Spanish army had. US soldiers arrived in
Cuba and quickly got sick with one disease after another,
with diseases becoming a much bigger issue for soldiers than combat.

(28:48):
The same was true on the other islands that the
US had acquired from Spain and was now occupying, so
there was a big focus on finding out how to
prevent and treat yellow fever and other tropical diseases. By
this point there was a little less resistance to the
idea that a disease could be spread through these kinds
of fights. Tics, which are arachnids, were identified as the

(29:12):
vector and Texas cattle fever in eighteen ninety. Mosquitoes were
identified as transmitting malaria in eighteen ninety seven, so when
the US Army Yellow Fever Board visited Cuba in nineteen hundred,
mosquitoes did not seem quite as far fetched as a
vector of the disease. This was not the first commission

(29:34):
the United States sent to Cuba for this kind of research.
We talked about the one in eighteen seventy nine, and
then there had been other ones in between, But this
is the one that Army physician Walter Reed was part
of and it's so associated with him that sometimes it
is called the Reed Commission.

Speaker 1 (29:52):
Reed and his team eventually visited Finlay. They used mosquito
eggs that he had collected, and did experiments that were
very similar to his own, putting a mosquito in a
test tube and then putting the mouth of that tube
against the skin of someone who had yellow fever. Once
the mosquito fed on that person, they would wait until

(30:12):
it had digested its meal and then have it bite
someone else. I will confess that this all puts a
cartoon in my head, the idea of waiting for a
mosquito to digest things like did you enjoy your soup? Sir?
A member of this commission named James Carroll participated in
one of these experiments, contracted yellow fever and recovered another.

(30:34):
Jesse Lazier, was apparently bitten by a mosquito in the lab,
not part of this controlled experiment, just a mosquito that
was flying around in a building that also housed yellow
fever patients. He contracted yellow fever and unfortunately died.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Based on the Commission's research in Cuba, Read announced that
mosquitos had been conclusively determined to be the vector for
yellow fever on October twenty third, nineteen hundred. Reid's commission
is sometimes also credited with figuring out the amount of
time required for a mosquito to be able to infect

(31:11):
someone with a serious case of yellow fever, called the
extrinsic incubation period, That, however, was discovered by Henry Rose
Carter in experiments carried out in Mississippi in eighteen ninety eight.
Carter did not publish this work until nineteen hundred, though,
and one of the sources used in this episode also

(31:31):
said that Finlay already understood this part of it as well.
When Reid announced and wrote about this work, he made
some references to Finlay, including at one point saying, quote,
it was Finley's theory, and he deserves much for having
suggested it. William Crawford Gorgos, who would later become surgeon
General of the US Army and was in charge of

(31:52):
sanitation during the building of the Panama Canal, called Finley's
reasoning behind identifying the mosquito as the quote best piece
of logical reasoning that can be found in medicine anywhere,
and also described the US as owing a great debt
to Finlay, but Finlay really didn't get much formal recognition
in the US. There was a much bigger focus on

(32:15):
Walter Reed. There was also a big focus on how
this discovery was connected to the military and military readiness.
In nineteen hundred, US Army General Leonard Wood, who was
a physician and military governor of Cuba, said, quote, the
confirmation of the doctrine of doctor Finlay is the biggest
step that has been given in medical science after the

(32:36):
discovery of Jenner's vaccine, and this single fact is enough
to justify the war against Spain. That recognition of Finlay
did not carry throughout the Army. At the Pan American
Medical Congress in February of nineteen oh one, the American
Army Board gave a presentation that made this discovery sound

(32:58):
like it was Walter Reid's work that happened at a
session Finlay was presiding over. Cuban delegates to this congress
were absolutely furious.

Speaker 1 (33:09):
But Finley got more recognition in Europe and in Cuba.
He became a national hero. He was appointed Chief Sanitary
Officer of Cuba. After Cuba became formally independent in nineteen
oh two. This work included mosquito control and eradication programs,
something that had started all across areas that were affected

(33:30):
by yellow fever as soon as RED made this announcement.
These efforts led to yellow fever being eradicated in the
southern United States and then a number of tropical cities
and towns. Although these mosquito control efforts involved the use
of insecticides that did not target only mosquitos, they killed
other insects as well, and the insecticides also had other

(33:53):
health effects of their own. Finley continued to work on
matters of public health in Cuba, including an anti high
infantile tetanus campaign. This included research carried out in nineteen
oh three which showed that wics that were being used
to tie off the umbilical cords of newborns provided a
favorable medium for tetanus to grow. Finlay developed a program

(34:17):
for distributing aseptic packages for treating the umbilica cord to
poor parts of Cuba, and that led to a steep
drop in infantile tentanus rates. Finlay retired in nineteen oh nine.
In nineteen eleven, The New York Times published a piece
titled Doctor Finlay gets full credit now. Havana physician who

(34:38):
solved the yellow fever problem is extolled here and abroad
using the name Charles, which Finlay did use himself in
work that was published in English. It described his research
prior to the arrival of the Read Commission, and it
summarized a paper written by a doctor from Edinburgh who wrote,
in part quote considering the Times that will eventually be

(35:00):
considered one of the most wonderful pieces of constructive work
in the history of medicine. But like every other advance,
it was rejected by contemporaries. Unlike nearly all.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
Other great medical discoverers, however, he has lived to see
the acceptance of his facts and has not had to
die of a broken heart. But it has been enough
to break anyone's heart to see himself so utterly ignored,
while the world has been singing the praises of the
men upon whom he forced his ideas. Carlos Juan Finley

(35:33):
died on August twentieth, nineteen fifteen, at the age of
eighty two. He had written forty articles on yellow fever
over the course of his career, and many many other
articles on other diseases. And conditions. Over the course of
his life. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine seven times, but he was never awarded it.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
He was briefly.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Acknowledged when Max Thuyler was awarded the Nobel Prize in
nineteen fifty one for his discoveries concerning yellow fever and
how to combat it. Those discoveries included an attenuated form
of the virus that could be used as a vaccine.
Part of the presentation speech said quote. As early as
the eighteenth century, the abundance of mosquitos and places where

(36:20):
the disease occurred has been observed, and in eighteen eighty one,
doctor Carlos Spinlay, a Cuban physician in Havana, had written
a treatise in which he asserted that the disease was
transmitted by mosquitoes, but his assertion drew little attention. As
we said earlier, Finley became a national hero in Cuba.

(36:40):
He was honored with postage, stamps and street names. The
Finlay Institute for Investigations in Tropical Medicine was established in
his honor after his death in twenty thirteen. He was
also honored with a Google Doodle for his one hundred
eightieth birthday. A yellow fever, of course, still exists today.

(37:01):
Researchers started discovering viruses and differentiating them from bacteria and
toxins at the very end of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The yellow fever virus was isolated for the
first time during a massive outbreak in Africa in nineteen
twenty seven. Today, the World Health Organization lists twenty seven

(37:21):
countries in Africa and thirteen in Latin America as at
high risk for yellow fever outbreaks. Protection from mosquito bites,
eliminating stagnant water, and mosquito eradication programs can all reduce
the risk of yellow fever outbreaks and outbreaks of other
mosquito born diseases, but the disease cannot be eliminated entirely.

(37:44):
In addition to AD's Egypti, which lives in urban areas,
it can also be carried by other mosquitoes that live
in the jungle and feed primarily on monkeys, so there's
ongoing circulation of the disease in jungle environments, which can
then be carried back to human settlements when people get
bitten in the jungle and then return home. Yellow fever

(38:06):
is vaccine preventable today, and while there are some anti
viral treatments that are used on occasion, there's no specific
yellow fever anti viral. Most people who contract it receive
supportive care. So that's Carlos swan Finlay. Finally, after many
years of wanting to do this episode, do you have.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
A listener mail? I wanted to say, listener mail that
you've been waiting to read for several years, but I
know that's not true, though, I mean, I could try
to look for some from way way in the past,
but I won't. Rather than reading a specific male, I
wanted to talk generally about the theme of some email
because when we did our episode on bagatsingh Thin, we

(38:50):
talked about how to pronounce the religion sick and how
there are people who pronounce it seek and we have
gotten some feedback from folks whose relatives who immigrated from
India do pronounce it seekh.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
So I wanted to talk a little bit more about that.
The people that I listened to on how to pronounce
this name are themselves six some of them are six
from India or somewhere else in the Indian subcontinent or
immigrants to the United States who are six and they
were pretty specifically adamant that sick is the correct pronunciation,

(39:27):
although as we said, like there's some nuance in how
to pronounce it with that vowel sound that I cannot
hear the difference and how it's being said.

Speaker 1 (39:38):
That said, the pronunciation of sikh was incredibly widespread here
in the US, incredibly widespread in former British territory and
what's now like India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and all
of that. And so the way it's really been characterized
is the pronounce nunciation of seek being a pronunciation that

(40:02):
evolved because of British colonization of that part of the world,
and that the pronunciation of sick is like reclaiming the
correct pronunciation from one that had been anglicized many years ago.
Absolutely unsurprising that people's maybe older relatives, maybe people who
came to the United States a long time ago, might

(40:24):
be using the pronunciation seek and that might sound correct
to them because that's the one that they grew up
with and have always used.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
But a lot of people have talked about trying to
reclaim the pronunciation of sick as the correct pronunciation now today.
So yeah, I think Holly and I, when you and
I were talking about it, we both had always heard
the pronunciation seek from earlier in our lives. Yeah, and
all of that, So I just wanted to give a

(40:53):
little more context to that after getting some email about it.
If you would like to send us an email about anything,
we're at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. And if
you want to find the show notes to this episode
with all of our research that we used, it is
at our website which is at mistonhistory dot com. And

(41:16):
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
but anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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