The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

Malaria would continue to take more lives, as William Gorgas allowed in his own reports, and the “amount of incapacity” caused by the disease was, as he said, very much greater than that due to all other diseases combined. Nearly all of the patients Roosevelt saw in the hospitals at Panama had been black men, as he acknowledged. And privately he had been appalled by some of the things he had seen, as we know from his correspondence with Shonts. “The least satisfactory feature of the entire work to my mind was the arrangement for feeding the negroes,” he wrote as soon as he reached Washington. “Those cooking sheds with their muddy floors and with the unclean pot which each man had in which he cooked everything, are certainly not what they should be . . . . Moreover, the very large sick rates among the negroes, compared with the whites, seems to me to show that a resolute effort should be made to teach the negro some of the principles of personal hygiene . . .” Could not something be done to provide better housing, better health for these workers? he asked.