Carlos Finlay

Medical history originally credited Dr. Walter Reed as the doctor whose work solved the scourge of 19th century warm weather, yellow fever, by proving that it was transmitted by mosquitoes.

This work eventually gave birth to the new fields of epidemiology and biomedicine.

But Cubans and even Dr. Reed himself knew that the real research hero here was a Cuban doctor named Carlos Finlay.

Finlay was born 176 years ago today in Puerto Principe, Cuba, the son of a Scottish immigrant father and a French immigrant mother. He studied medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, from which he graduated in 1855. Ten years later Dr. Finlay

"sent a paper to the Academy of Sciences in Havana outlining his theory on weather conditions and the yellow fever disease. He was the first to theorize that a mosquito was the way by which yellow fever was transmitted; a mosquito that bites a victim of the disease could bite a healthy person and spread the disease...

... In 1871 he spoke at medical conferences in Havana and Washington, D.C., but his theory of mosquito transmission of the virus met with silence from the medical and scientific community.

In 1900, during the first U.S. occupation of Cuba, a U.S. medical commission led by Dr. Walter Reed went to Havana to study the disease. At first the U.S. scientists didn't pursue Dr. Finlay's "mosquito" theories, certain that it was "filth" that spread the yellow fever virus.

When all their experiments failed, they began to look over Dr. Finlay's 19 years of research. Eventually they concluded that yellow fever is contagious only in the first 3 days of illness, and this became the first layer of proof for Dr. Finlay's theory.

When Dr. Reed proved that Dr. Finlay had been right all along, mosquito control programs were introduced throughout Cuba, (and in the Panama Canal zone, where worked had stopped due to yellow fever outbreaks and many deaths) and the disease brought under control.

Sadly, however, Dr. Reed's original report failed to even mention Dr. Finlay's theories and/or research, and it wasn't until 1954 (39 years after Dr. Finlay's death) that the International Congress of Medical History granted him the proper credit.