author
William Crawford Gorgas
1854–1920
A U.S. Army physician who helped change public health by attacking the mosquito-borne diseases that once stopped major projects in their tracks. His sanitation campaigns in Havana and the Panama Canal Zone made him one of the key figures behind the fight against yellow fever and malaria.
1 Audiobook
Sanitation in Panama
by William Crawford Gorgas
About the author
Born in Alabama in 1854, William Crawford Gorgas studied medicine at Bellevue Hospital Medical College and then joined the U.S. Army medical corps. Early in his career, he saw how devastating yellow fever could be, and that experience shaped the work he became famous for.
Gorgas is best remembered for leading sanitation and mosquito-control efforts in Havana after the Spanish-American War and later in the Panama Canal Zone. By applying the then-new understanding that mosquitoes spread yellow fever, and by pushing large-scale public health measures, he helped curb yellow fever and malaria in places where those diseases had made life and work extremely dangerous.
He later served as Surgeon General of the U.S. Army from 1914 to 1918. Gorgas died in London in 1920, but his legacy lived on in modern public health, tropical medicine, and the idea that careful disease prevention can change the course of history.