Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay was the son of a Scottish father and a French mother. He had been educated in France and at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, and having practiced medicine in Havana for twenty-odd years, he had concluded that yellow fever was not only transmitted by the mosquito but by a specific mosquito—a silvery, comparatively noiseless household variety, Stegomyia fasciata (later to be called Aëdes aegypti). Out of some eight hundred known varieties, he had picked this one as the carrier of the disease.
