(1833–1915). Cuban epidemiologist Carlos Juan Finlay was the first to discover that a mosquito is responsible for transmitting yellow fever from infected humans to healthy humans. Although he published experimental evidence of this discovery in 1886, his ideas were ignored for 20 years.
Carlos Juan Finlay was born on December 3, 1833, in Puerto Príncipe, Cuba. He graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1855 and then returned to Cuba, where he practiced medicine in the cities of Matanzas and Havana. In 1879 the Cuban government appointed Finlay to work with the North American commission studying the causes of yellow fever; two years later he was chosen to attend the fifth International Sanitary Conference in Washington, D.C., as the Cuban delegate. At the conference, Finlay urged the study of agents that may cause yellow fever, and soon afterward he stated that the carrier was the mosquito Culex fasciatus (now known as Aedes aegypti).
In 1900 the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Board (headed by the physician Walter Reed) arrived in Cuba, and Finlay attempted to persuade Reed of his mosquito theory. Although skeptical, Reed decided to investigate the idea, refining Finlay’s experimental procedures in the process. Shortly thereafter, Reed proved that mosquitoes do indeed transmit yellow fever; U.S. Army surgeon William Crawford Gorgas’s eradication of the disease in Cuba and Panama followed. Finlay was appointed chief sanitation officer of Cuba from 1902 to 1909. He died on August 20, 1915, in Havana. After Finlay’s death the Cuban government created the Finlay Institute for Investigations in Tropical Medicine in his honor.
