12/03/2013
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 received 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." This time the paper was published, but the wide professional circulation of The Annals of the Academy of Medical, Physical, and Natural Sciences of Havanadid not assure Finlay of widespread support. Indeed, only one other Cuban physician, Claudio Delgado, rallied to Finlay's side in those early years.
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