Reed earned his medical degree in 1869 at the age of seventeen. He enlisted in the US Army Medical Corps in 1875 and was predominantly posted to units across the western frontier engaged in pacifying, slaughtering, and relocating indigenous populations. Reed tended both American soldiers and indigenous peoples, including the famed Apache Geronimo. In 1893, as a professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy, Reed joined the newly created Army Medical School, where he was able to conduct unhindered research of his own choosing. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he was posted to Cuba to investigate an epidemic of typhoid fever, which he concluded was the result of contact with fecal matter or food and drink contaminated by flies. During his stay in Cuba, however, he became more interested in yellow fever, which was buckling American troops at an alarming rate. In June 1900, Reed was appointed to establish and head the US Army Yellow Fever Commission. Reed was an avid fan of Carlos Finlay’s résumé, and Finlay’s body of work formed the basis for Reed’s own research.
Although his four-member team in Cuba, made up of himself, another American, a Canadian, and a Cuban, received full backing from their military superiors, the media maligned his theory that the mosquito transmitted the disease. An article in The Washington Post, for example, mocked, “Of all the silly and nonsensical rigamarole of yellow fever that has yet found its way into print—and there has been enough to build a fleet—the silliest beyond compare is to be found in the arguments and theories generated by a mosquito hypothesis.” In October 1900, after conducting trials with human test subjects, many of whom died, including one of his team members, Reed announced that he had scientifically and definitively unmasked the female Aedes mosquito as the cause of yellow fever, while identifying the cyclical time frame of contagion between humans and mosquitoes.* General Leonard Wood, a physician and the US governor of Cuba, acknowledged and applauded that “the confirmation of Dr. Finlay’s doctrine is the greatest step forward made in medical science since Jenner’s discovery of the [smallpox] vaccination.” Walter Reed received credit and fame (and numerous institutions named in his honor) for apprehending the killer Aedes mosquito. Prior to his premature death in 1902 from complications of a ruptured appendix, however, he publicly shared recognition with his team and with his hero and mentor, Carlos Finlay.*
Following Reed’s announcement, the chief military sanitary officer in Havana, Dr. William Gorgas, energetically set out to rid the island of yellow fever through a systematic and deliberate mosquito sanitation and extermination program. Gorgas, who survived yellow fever as a youth in Texas, was not connected to the “Reed Board” nor was he a research scientist. He was a military doctor who fanatically carried out his orders to destroy yellow fever in Havana. Gorgas first meticulously mapped the city and surrounds before deploying more than 300 men in six teams working around the clock to execute his equally meticulous war on Havana’s mosquitoes. These “sanitation squads” attacked the finicky breeding patterns and limited flight range of Aedes mosquitoes by draining ponds and swamps, limiting standing water and open barrels, erecting netting, clear-cutting targeted vegetation, fumigating with sulfur and insecticidal chrysanthemum-pyrethrum powder, and spraying all unreachable or suspect locations with a coat of pyrethrum-laced kerosene on top of other wholesale sanitation measures throughout the city. For the first time since 1648, thanks to the keen determination of Gorgas, yellow fever was completely eradicated from Havana by 1902. After the last American outbreak in New Orleans in 1905, “cleanup crews” reoccupied Cuba and by 1908 the entire country was released from the clutches of yellow fever. Malaria and dengue, however, continued to prowl the island.
The actual yellow fever virus, however, was not isolated until 1927. Under sponsorship of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, successful vaccination was realized a decade later in 1937, courtesy of South African American Max Theiler. In 1951, when accepting his Nobel Prize for this accomplishment, Theiler was asked what he was going to do with his prize money. He answered, “Buy a case of scotch and watch the Dodgers.” Yellow fever was defanged and stripped of its monumental impact on geopolitical affairs. The curtain was drawn on its career as a feared and adroit killer and as a mettlesome and influential agent of human history. Malaria, however, proved to be an indefatigable survivor and determined enemy.
Following the American military extraction from Cuba and his own successful Cuban mosquito crusade, Gorgas was superseded as the island’s chief health officer by none other than Dr. Carlos Finlay. Gorgas’s unique talents and eradication expertise were required elsewhere. He had been summoned to conjure his mosquito-silencing, abracadabra magic on the historically lethal mosquitoes of Panama. Having already overpowered and dispatched the Spanish, English, Scottish, and French, the undefeated Panamanian mosquito next challenged the confident United States, managed by its headstrong president, Teddy Roosevelt, for Canal Zone supremacy. “If we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy we must build up our power without borders,” announced the dynamic young president. “We must build the Isthmian canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the east and west.” To make its newly acquired Pacific colonies, including the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, Hawaii, and chains of smaller atolls and islands, financially viable and to fuse its newly created global empire, America needed to punch a forty-eight-mile canal through Panama. This shortcut linking the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans would supplant the perilous, time-consuming, big-ticket journey around the tip of South America at Cape Horn. Teddy was adamant that where the Spanish, English, Scottish, and French had failed, the Americans would succeed in constructing an economic superhighway across the isthmus. His demanding order to his engineers was simply “Make the dirt fly!”
This idea was not innovative, but the engineering and mosquito control were. The first Spanish attempt to blaze a trail across Panama at Darien in 1534 was rebuffed by the mosquito. Ensuing Spanish colonial attempts met the same disease-ridden destiny. After they had sacrificed over 40,000 men to the mosquito, their painstaking efforts produced little more than a grubby single-lane mule track through the jungle, bracketed by two languid, fever-drenched villages. The mosquito thwarted an English attempt in 1668 before writing the Scottish script for William Paterson’s Darien horror show in 1698, climaxing with the forfeiture of Scotland’s independence.
In 1882, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the vaunted French engineer who had completed the Suez Canal in 1869, tried to repeat his success in Panama. He bribed government officials and lured investors to back his project. The French effort foundered in mud and mosquitoes. While battling malaria after a visit to Panama in 1887, French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin recalled the skeletal bushwhacking workers being “devoured by mosquitoes.” The popular magazine Harper’s Weekly ran the headline “Is M. de Lesseps a Canal Digger or a Grave Digger?” Nearly 85% of the workforce suffered from mosquito-borne disease. Over 23,000 men (25% of the personnel) died, primarily from yellow fever, before the project, nearing 40% completion, was abandoned in 1889 amid bankruptcy and scandal. A total of $300 million from over 800,000 investors had been gobbled up by Panamanian mosquitoes. Numerous politicians and contractors were convicted of collusion and corruption, including Gustave Eiffel, who had recently unveiled his tower at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair for the centennial celebration of the Storming of the Bastille.
To procure the rights to the Canal Zone, the United States, using gunboat diplomacy while militarily buttressing local revolutionaries, chiseled out the independent country of Panama from Colombia. In 1903, the United States recognized the sovereign Republic of Panama, and two weeks later, America was granted permanent exclusive domain over the ten-mile-wide strip, the Canal Zone. The Americans took up the gauntlet in 1904, armed with the newly discovered knowledge that mosquitoes spread deadly diseases. In transit to the unfinished French ditch, Gorgas was admonished by a local: “A White man
’s a fool to go there and a bigger fool to stay.” Fresh from his successful eradication campaign in Cuba, Gorgas and 4,100 workers systematically eradicated yellow fever from the Canal Zone.
Gorgas and his sanitation squads used the same systems that had destroyed the Aedes mosquito in Cuba, as well as new trial-and-error eradication techniques. According to Sonia Shah, the sanitation “blitzkrieg” consumed “the entire U.S. supply of sulphur, pyrethrum, and kerosene oil.” Twenty-one quinine dispensaries flanking the canal also doled out daily preventive doses to most workers. By 1906, two years into construction, yellow fever completely disappeared, and malaria rates had fallen by 90%. Although Gorgas lamented that “We did not get rid of malaria on the Isthmus of Panama, as we did in Cuba,” he understood the immense significance of his work. In 1905, the canal had a death rate three times higher than the continental United States. Upon completion in 1914, it had a death rate half that of the US. Officially, 5,609 workers (out of 60,000 total) died of disease and injury from 1904 through 1914. The canal was unlocked to traffic only days after the outbreak of the First World War on August 4, 1914.
“Make the Dirt Fly!”: Innovative and effective mosquito control in Panama under Dr. William Gorgas allowed the Americans to succeed where the mosquito-chased Spanish, British, Scottish, and French had failed in constructing a Panama Canal. American efforts under President Theodore Roosevelt began in 1904, and the canal was opened to traffic in 1914. Here a member of a Sanitation Squad sprays oil on mosquito breeding grounds, Panama, 1906. (Library of Congress)
In light of the discoveries made by Manson, Ross, Grassi, Reed, and Gorgas, among others, countries around the world established national health departments, schools of tropical medicine, benefactors for scientific research like the Rockefeller Foundation, departments of military hygiene, army nursing corps, sanitation commissions, public waste disposal infrastructure, and codified health laws. In his exploration of the impacts of mosquito control during the construction of the Panama Canal, Paul Sutter reports that “it was the commercial and military expansion of the United States into tropical Latin America and the Asian Pacific that most forcefully connected federal entomological expertise to public health campaigns. Indeed, these imperial campaigns helped to build federal public health capacity and to reframe disease control . . . as a federal issue during the early twentieth century.” The United States was joined by a host of other countries in framing national health as being not only a civilian priority (or perhaps even a legal right) but a military necessity as well. The mosquito was at the top of everyone’s hit list.
The construction of the Panama Canal secured American economic domination and naval supremacy.* “Effective control of malaria and yellow fever,” acknowledges J. R. McNeill, “changed the balance of power in the Americas and the world.” The scales of global power tipped toward a growing industrial, economic, and military American superpower. While Teddy Roosevelt opened new American economic frontiers, his policies also thrust the United States headlong into the great game of world politics. He personally played a hand at this international gaming table, winning the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a settlement to the Russo-Japanese War.
The decisive Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 shocked global observers and marked a turning point in world history. It was the first major military triumph of an Asian power over a European power since the Mongol war machine crafted by Genghis Khan 700 years earlier. Japan seemingly arrived on the world stage out of nowhere. Formerly an introverted and reticent nation, Japan sought to modernize, industrialize, and join the currents of global commerce. The United States was now also positioned as a Pacific power, no longer confined to Atlantic waters since the colonial prize winnings of the Spanish-American War and the Panama Canal. Japan resented American economic encroachment on the Pacific Rim. In need of petroleum, rubber, tin, and other resources, the nation of islands eventually aimed to carve out its own imperial “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” just as the United States had done during the turn-of-the-century era of America. Conflict between the two vying Pacific nations remained dormant, for now.
In addition to the colonial spoils from the Spanish-American War, the United States used the conflict as an excuse to annex Hawaii. In 1893, a group of American plantation owners, entrepreneurs, and investors, aided by US Marines, overthrew the traditional Hawaiian government and placed Queen Lili’uokalani under house arrest, forcing her to abdicate the throne two years later. The aim of these American conspirators was simple. Like Cuba, Hawaii under American jurisdiction meant foreign tariffs on their sugar bounty unloaded at American ports would no longer apply. Proponents of annexation argued that Hawaii was a strategically vital economic and military bastion and a prerequisite to promote and protect American interests in Asia. Despite the objection from most indigenous Hawaiians, Congress voted to officially annex the Territory of Hawaii in 1898 shortly after the outbreak of war with Spain. The following year, the United States established a permanent naval base at Pearl Harbor.
CHAPTER 17
This Is Ann: She’s Dying to Meet You: The Second World War, Dr. Seuss, and DDT
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, over 16 million Americans eventually shouldered the burdens of war and were thrust into combat against both the Axis powers and deadly mosquitoes. That infamous day drove the United States into a maelstrom of total war and set in motion a series of transformative events that rearranged and soldered the circuit board and conductors of global power, including the mosquito’s place within this new composite world order. To her own jeopardy, the mosquito was inextricably tangled in these historic global affairs. Like our own life-or-death struggles being mediated by bullets on the bloodstained battlefields of the largest war ever witnessed, for the mosquito these were also troubling, life-threatening times.
At the outset of the Second World War, “the incidence of malaria in the United States was,” according to the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, a wartime predecessor to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “the lowest in history.” As the war unfolded, a very different story emerged. Combating the mosquito, as well as the human enemy, was paramount to victory on all fronts. The Second World War was a watershed for science, medicine, technology, and military hardware, including the modernization and enhancement of our weaponry and munitions against mosquitoes. During the conflict and the immediate Cold War “peace” that followed, effective synthetic malaria drugs like atabrine and chloroquine, and the mass-produced, inexpensive eradication chemical DDT, propelled the mosquito and her diseases into a graveyard spiral and a full-blown global retreat.* For the first time in history, humans gained the upper hand in our eternal war with mosquitoes.
Equipped with the recent discoveries of mosquito-borne disease by Ross, Grassi, Finlay, Reed, and others, during both world wars and certainly more so in the second, governments and their militaries were able to deal more effectively with mosquito control, contagion, and treatment. Having cornered the mosquito, and identified it as the purveyor of malaria, yellow fever, and other debilitating and deadly diseases, humans were finally learning how to scientifically fight her bite.
Our research, development, and experimental trial by fire for innovative mosquito-assassinating ammunition, however, took time. It was punched into hyperdrive when the Japanese awoke the American sleeping giant at Pearl Harbor. The US military-industrial juggernaut placed a high priority on mosquito research and viewed her annihilation as a vital cog in the Allied war effort. Quinine was shelved for more proficient synthetic malaria drugs such as atabrine and chloroquine, and the pesticidal properties of the cheap miracle-chemical DDT unearthed in 1939 proved to be a universal lifesaver.
In a more sinister application of these scientific advances, the mosquito was also ominously added to our military arsenal as a biological agent. The mosquito and her diseases were the substance of bone-chilling experimentation and medi
cal and weapons research by both the Axis and Allied powers. We could now harness her destructive power and her dominion of death to purge our human enemies. In the Pontine Marshes surrounding Anzio, the Nazis deployed malarious mosquitoes as a premeditated biological weapon against Allied forces advancing on Rome.
Although the mosquito had been trapped by science, synthetic drugs, and the panacea insecticide DDT, she was by no means finished with her influential feeding and deadly carnage. Despite the unlocking of her secrets, between the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the unconditional surrenders of the Second in 1945, the mosquito continued to incapacitate and kill millions of soldiers and civilians around the planet. During the Second World War, however, American researchers and mosquito soldiers of the classified and top secret “Malaria Project” finally cracked her enigmatic code using the chemical formula of DDT. Hope was on the horizon.
Unlike in the Second World War, although always a willing and enthusiastic combatant, the mosquito was sidelined from the principal and pivotal fields of the First World War. She was all quiet on the Western Front. The frigid European theaters of war were simply too far north for her to enlist and contribute to the futile butchery. She did, however, make frequent guest appearances among significantly leaner troop concentrations in other, much smaller “sideshow” campaigns in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. The influence of the mosquito, however, was generally restricted to personal dealings in death and did not bite into the larger concerns of the war or its outcome.*
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