The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

There was, however, another theory—even as early as 1881. Dr. Josiah Clark Nott was a general practitioner in Mobile, Alabama, and it is one of those extraordinary coincidences of history that he happened to be the doctor who, in 1854, attended Amelia Gayle Gorgas at the birth of her son, William Crawford. In 1848 Dr. Nott published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal in which he made the fantastic claim that malaria and yellow fever were undoubtedly conveyed by insects and possibly by the mosquito. His mention of the mosquito was only in passing. His main point was that the spread of the disease could not be explained by any laws governing vapors or gases. But in 1854 a “traveling naturalist” for the Paris Museum, Lewis Beauperthuy, then in Venezuela, concluded that malaria and yellow fever “are produced by a venomous fluid injected under the skin by mosquitoes like poison injected by snakes.” Swamps and marshes spread sickness, he said, not by the vapors they exuded, but because mosquitoes bred there. In Washington, a Dr. Albert Freeman Africanus King, a professor of obstetrics, had arrived at the same conclusion.