GORGAS PLAQUE MISINFORMING TSC STUDENTS, VISITORS

"His reasoning for selecting the Stegomyia as the bearer of yellow fever is the best piece of logical reasoning that can be found in medicine anywhere." Willam Gorgas

By Juan Montoya
"Largely through General Gorgas work, the cause and prevention of yellow fever were discovered."
That assertion on a bronze plaque affixed to next to the door of the president's office of Gorgas Hall at Texas Southmost College crediting Dr. William Gorgas' work at Ft. Brown for finding the "cause" and prevention of yellow fever flies in the face of the truth.
Numerous local would-be historians including the Brownsville Herald's favorite Carl Chilton have propogated that tale countless times.

Here's one example. In the June 9, 2013 Brownsville Herald, Chilton once again weasel-words his historical column to say this:
"In 1883, a young Army medical officer, William Crawford Gorgas, arrived at Ft. Brown, where he encountered yellow fever for the first time. The cause of the disease was not known. Gorgas treated his patients with whiskey, brandy, and mustard seed. He studied the disease and began research which several years later led to the discovery that yellow fever was carried by the mosquito."
Now, notice that Chilton doesn't say that Gorgas discovered that mosquitoes were the carriers. Instead, he says that Gorgas' research "led to the discovery" several years later.
It is a lie.
Chilton knows it. The medical community know it. And the editors of the newspaper should also know it.
Why are they allowing this drivel to pass off as history? Why is that Big Lie still etched in the plaque in fomnt of the Arnulfo Oliveira Student Union Center at Texas Southmost College and the president's office? Why is the Gorgas Society at the college still permitted to repeat these ignorant statements?
The real discoverer that the disease was carried by mosquitoes was Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay, a Cuban, or to be more PC, an Hispanic.
His discovery led researchers like Walter Reed and other leading medical investigators of the time to re-examine their thinking and consider Finlay's meticulous research.
The Philip S. Hench Yellow Fever Collection web page states that:

"For twenty years of his professional life, renowned Cuban physician and scientist Carlos J. Finlay stood at the center of a vigorously debated medical controversy. The etiology of yellow fever – its causes and origins – had puzzled medical practitioners since the earliest recorded cases of the disease in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Periodic epidemics of yellow fever ravaged the population of Finlay's native Cuba, particularly affecting the citizens of Havana, where he set up a medical practice in 1864. Finlay was intensely interested in epidemiology and public health, and his initial work on cholera – the result of a severe outbreak of the disease in Havana in 1867 – challenged the perceived wisdom of medical authorities.

His conclusion that the disease was waterborne, though later verified, was rejected by publishers at the time. Finlay soon afterwards began research on yellow fever, publishing his first paper on it in 1872. Here the same keen observations and logical deductions which informed his analysis of cholera lead him to propose in 1881 that the Culex mosquito be "hypothetically considered as the agent of transmission of yellow fever."

(By the way, Gorgas received a medical degree from New York's Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1876 and joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps in 1880, four years after Finlay published his first research paper on yellow fever linking mosquitoes to the transmission of the disease. He didn't get to Ft. Brown until 1882 and stayed until 1884.)
When the Walter Reed Yellow Fever Commission decided to test the mosquito theory, Finlay provided the mosquitoes, and with the Commission's first scientifically valid success, Walter Reed wrote triumphantly, "The case is a beautiful one, and will be seen by the Board of Havana Experts, today, all of whom, except Finlay, consider the theory a wild one!"
The full run of experiments at Camp Lazear vindicated Finlay's two-decade-long struggle. In the glow of that early success, Reed acknowledged that "it was Finlay's theory, and he deserves much for having suggested it."
Gorgas, who later applied the results of the experiments to a public health campaign which made possible the construction of the Panama Canal, characterized Finlay's contribution in this way: "His reasoning for selecting the Stegomyia as the bearer of yellow fever is the best piece of logical reasoning that can be found in medicine anywhere."