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stopped off in Barcelona (where the vessel picked up the disease) en route from Genoa, thereby allowing his cargo of infected immigrants to spread into the unsuspecting city.


…in March the pestilence spread with frightful rapidity, and...the greatest terror prevailed in all


quarters of the town. The press endeavoured to calm the fears


of the inhabitants by publishing fewer deaths than took place…


nothing could exceed the gloom and desolation that pervaded the city…


Dr J H Scrivener writing about the 1871 epidemic in the Medical Times and Gazette, 1872


Transatlantic disease trade


The timing of yellow-fever epidemics in the Ameri- cas suggests the disease first travelled across the Atlantic in the early sixteenth century; Aëdes aegypti mosquitoes were inadvertently transported from Africa in the bilges of transatlantic slave ships.


Read


Crosby MC. The American Plague: The untold story of yellow fever, the epidemic that shaped our history. New York: Penguin; 2006.


Packard RM. The Making of a Tropical Disease: A short history of malaria. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 2010.


Canal killer


When the French tried to build a canal through the Panama isthmus in the 1880s, they were forced to abandon their plans after they lost 22 000 workers to disease. The Americans later bought the rights to continue the project, along with the rotting French cranes and locomotives, but still faced the very real problem of endemic malaria and yellow fever. They turned to US Army surgeon William Crawford Gorgas (1854–1920) for help. Immune to yellow fever himself, thanks to contracting it in Texas, Gorgas had virtually eradicated the disease from Havana, Cuba, via an ex- treme mosquito-control programme. He did the same in Panama, ridding the Canal Zone of yellow fever within 16 months and enabling construction to begin.


William Crawford Gorgas, Sir Ronald Ross and Henry Claye Weeks on board the SS Advance Photograph E B Meyrowitz, 1904 L0011949 Wellcome Images


Gorgas (left) and the Secretary of the American Mosquito Extermination Society, Henry Claye Weeks (right), see off Sir Ronald Ross (centre), winner of the Nobel Prize for his discovery that malaria was trans- mitted by mosquitoes. He is bound for Panama.


The hut experiment


In 1900, three members of the newly founded London School of Tropical Medicine spent three months in a hut in a malaria-infested region near Ostia, Italy to test Dr Ronald Ross’s (1857–1932) theory that malaria was transmitted by mosquito. By staying indoors from dusk until dawn they escaped infection. The team included Dr Louis Sambon (1865–1931), who was employed by Henry Wellcome three years later to tour Europe purchasing books and artefacts for Wellcome’s collection.


Researchers outside the British experimental hut in Ostia Coloured photograph of a drawing Amedeo John Engel Terzi 41673i Wellcome Library


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