CHAPTER 16

Unmasking the Mosquito: Disease and Imperialism

Kentucky physician and leading expert on yellow fever Dr. Luke Blackburn was too old to enlist. But as a Confederate zealot, he was determined to serve the southern cause. He hatched a maniacal plan to defeat the Union by unleashing a biblical plague of yellow fever on the District of Columbia, killing Lincoln in the process. Learning of a nasty black vomit epidemic stalking Bermuda, which was also a haven for Confederate blockade runners, in April 1864, he made passage to the island. Upon arrival, Dr. Blackburn proceeded to fill several trunks with soiled garments and bedding from yellow fever victims. The boxes were loaded onto a steamer destined to spread the dreaded virus and fever-burning death to an unsuspecting population. In August, on instruction from Blackburn, Godfrey Hyams, a coconspirator who was to be paid the handsome sum of $60,000 upon delivery, sold the trunks of “contaminated” items to a trade store a few blocks from the White House. Blackburn had told his messenger that the “infected” clothing “will kill them at sixty yards.” This already strange and shocking story of biological mosquito weaponry takes an unexpected turn and enters the bizarre, adhering to Mark Twain’s reality that “truth is stranger than fiction.”

In April 1865, as Generals Lee and Grant were cordially discussing terms of surrender in Wilmer McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Court House, Blackburn was back in Bermuda colluding to unleash a second serving of yellow fever, using the same delivery system. This time, he contracted another agent, Edward Swan, to deliver trunks of tainted clothing and linens to New York City for “the destruction of the masses there.” Blackburn, however, had an additional surprise for the city. Once yellow fever had set its hooks and plagued the panicked population, he would unleash a subsequent wave of terror—Blackburn had concocted plans to poison New York’s water supply. Chaos and death would consume his “damn Yankees.”

On April 12, two days before the assassination of President Lincoln, a resentful and still unpaid Godfrey Hyams casually walked into the United States Consulate in Toronto. He calmly and methodically told authorities the details of his involvement in Blackburn’s macabre intrigues. When news reached Bermuda, authorities raided Swan’s hotel and found the trunks and their contents, saturated in black vomit. Swan was arrested and convicted of violating local health codes. With his conspiracy exposed, Blackburn too was arrested, but was eventually acquitted.

Like the British-gifted smallpox blankets of Pontiac’s Rebellion, and Cornwallis’s unrewarding slave-dispensed smallpox ventures during the American Revolution, Blackburn’s nefarious but ingenious scheme, despite an honest effort, was also foiled and ended in failure. The botched conspiracies of Dr. Blackburn, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on yellow fever, also reveal the limited medical knowledge surrounding mosquito-borne disease. Our apex assassin remained anonymous and her lethal subversion undetected.

Only Aedes mosquitoes, not soiled clothes or sheets, can transmit the deadly virus of yellow fever, and in the decades after the war, she did just that. During the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, the mosquito unleashed one of the worst epidemics in American history. In Memphis, the throngs of sick and dying would be ministered to by none other than the illustrious Dr. Luke Blackburn, earning him the morbid nickname “Dr. Black Vomit.” Memphis, climbing from the bluffs of the lazily drifting Mississippi River, was a tired and somber city. The Civil War had drained the vibrant life from the bustling cotton port and railway hub for four major lines. By the spring of 1878, the city was home to a diverse population of 45,000 inhabitants, including freshly emancipated former slaves, sharecroppers, recent German immigrants, Confederate sympathizers and cotton plantation owners, and northern shipping and business moguls. This eclectic population was almost double that of Atlanta or Nashville, and south of the Mason-Dixon Line was second in size only to New Orleans. The contrasting city of Memphis, sitting at the cultural crossroads between North and South, while acting as the gatekeeper to the new western frontier, had gained the reputation as a den of despondency, filth, and disease. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, it was swallowed by murderous, bloodthirsty mosquitoes.

Memphis was not the only city in the South with the melancholy mosquito-orchestrated delta blues, however. Rapacious mosquitoes insidiously, and quite diligently, gnawed the old Confederacy to pieces. During the devastating yellow fever epidemics that coursed through the South during the 1870s, Dr. Luke Blackburn traveled, like the virus itself, from city to city, including Memphis, to treat the afflicted, refusing any form of compensation.

The first major postwar epidemic mushroomed in 1867, with the mosquito eating her way through the Gulf states, killing upwards of 6,000 people. Having never been convicted for his stabs at biological warfare, Blackburn was in New Orleans, the epicenter of the epidemic, tending to the infected. Despite his best, but medically and scientifically blind, efforts, yellow fever claimed 3,200 people in the “Big Easy.” Six years later, yellow fever snatched another 5,000 lives, including 3,500 in Memphis, where Dr. Blackburn had hung out his shingle. He then turned his migrant medical road show east to Florida in 1877 during another yellow fever epidemic, which killed roughly 2,200 people. A year later, he was back in Memphis as the mosquito was shredding the Mississippi River Valley and harvesting human souls.

By the close of August 1878, Luke Blackburn was exhausted. Not only was he ministering to thousands of floundering yellow fever victims languishing in the sweltering heat of Memphis, he was also the Democratic candidate in Kentucky’s race for governor. An eerie stillness hung over the city while Blackburn, a die-hard Confederate, took some respite to view the historic sights of Memphis, including Jefferson Davis’s home on Court Street. There was no foot traffic, save ghosts, gracing Union Avenue; Beale Street was silent and lifeless; and Main Street was haunted only by windswept trash and a few hurrying, frightened citizens. Nearly 25,000 residents, more than half the city, had already fled in panic. Of the roughly 20,000 remaining, 17,000 would contract yellow fever. The mosquito had besieged Memphis.

In late July, the first case of yellow fever was reported. A sailor on board a ship that had made passage to Memphis from Cuba via New Orleans instigated the epidemic. “Many of those ships in 1878 came from Cuba, where the Ten Years’ War for independence was coming to an end and an epidemic of yellow fever had been raging since March,” reports Molly Caldwell Crosby in her nail-biting, finely crafted book The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History, charting the 1878 yellow fever epidemic that frayed the southern United States. “Refugees landed in New Orleans by the hundreds. . . . The harbor was filling with vessels bobbing in the water, the Yellow Jack flying high over their decks.” Within a month, the remaining dazed and confused residents of a traumatized Memphis were drowning in the feverish summer sweats of yellow fever. The city was paralyzed in a tomb of death, bereavement, and fear. The average daily mortality rate during the month of September was 200. The mosquito had literally sucked the life out of Memphis and turned it into a city of crypts and corpses. While America was keenly watching the protracted Cuban insurgency against Spanish rule with covetous commercial eyes, the yellow fever epidemic spread unchecked from Memphis, snaking across the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio River watersheds.

By this time, Blackburn had traveled to Louisville to attend to its sick and dying victims of “Yellow Jack.” The 1878 epidemic thundered across the shuddering South until the chilly winds and first frosts of October killed the unknown mosquito assailant and put an end to more than five months of suffering. Blackburn resumed his political campaign, winning the election by a decisive 20% margin over his Republican opponent. He served as governor of Kentucky from 1879 to 1883 and continued to practice medicine until his death in 1887. His tombstone is emblazoned with the simple slogan THE GOOD SAMARITAN. As a tribute to “Dr. Black Vomit,” the Blackburn Correctional Complex, a minimum-security prison near Lexington, Kentucky, was unlocked for tenants in 1972 in his honor. Given his attempted biological terror campaign (including an indirect shot at Lincoln’s life), for which he was never brought to justice, in this case irony steals the last laugh.

During the pandemic of 1878, of the 120,000 people infected, yellow fever harvested more than 20,000 souls: 1,100 in Vicksburg, 4,100 in New Orleans, and 5,500 in Memphis—a staggering 28% of those who stayed behind, or 12% of the original population. Imagine the pandemonium and mayhem in our current sociocultural climate if 165,000 people in metropolitan Memphis died from yellow fever or another choice disease over the next few months. The 1878 contagion, the worst yellow fever tragedy in American history, was also, thankfully, the last major outbreak of the disease. The virus rippled through the southern states periodically until the last minor epidemic imported from Cuba in 1905 claimed 500 people in New Orleans.

The epidemics that gripped the battle-scarred and mosquito-bitten country in the 1870s were spawned by the rapid growth of trade and the expansion of markets not only in the United States, but also across South and Central America and the Caribbean. The viral 1878 epidemic, for instance, was traded from the lingering Spanish satellite of Cuba through New Orleans to Memphis. The United States looked on these few loitering Spanish colonies, the remnants of a once dominant empire, with lusting imperialistic eyes to propel its own wielding industry and mercantilist economic system into international waters. When the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898, “Why trade when you can invade?” entered the American playbook. America’s first target in this great game of global empire building was Cuba.

During this maiden charge of American colonization in Cuba, the mosquito stood between the United States and mountains of money. Wealth is a powerful motivator, even when daring to joust with and taunt deadly Cuban mosquitoes. A few determined and resolute mosquito fighters commanded by Dr. Walter Reed escorted America’s first true flirtation with imperialism during the Spanish-American War. While American soldiers of the Fifth Army Corps set their gunsights on unseasoned Spanish defenders, Reed’s US Army Yellow Fever Commission trained their microscope crosshairs squarely on Cuban mosquitoes.

Yellow Jack-in-the-Box: An 1873 cartoon from Leslie’s Weekly portrays the state of Florida in the clutches of a yellow fever Gollum-like demon escaping a crate labeled TRADE while Columbia, the personification of the United States of America, signals for help. Behind the trio, frightened Americans flee for their lives. As trade, most notably from the Caribbean, was regenerated and energized after the Civil War, yellow fever went on a serial killing spree across the United States during the 1870s. (Library of Congress)

Predictably, as American infrastructure and trade blossomed after the Civil War, so, too, did mosquito-borne disease. Not only were mosquito-reared epidemics, including the 1878 infestation trafficked from Cuba, escalating in breadth and ferocity, she was also biting into the bank accounts of American traders and investors in the process. Prior to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, she was killing both people and profit at peak rates.

The mosquito carnage of 1878, for example, bit a distressing $200 million chunk out of the US economy. Congress candidly announced that “to no other great nation of the earth is yellow fever so calamitous as to the United States of America.” The mosquito swung through the South like a wrecking ball and smashed the economic levees, draining American finance and commercial buoyancy. Congress responded by creating the National Board of Health the following year to remedy these debilitating health and economic concerns. Little could be done, however, as the actual cause of mosquito-borne disease, including yellow fever, was still anonymous. Although it was hiding in plain sight, scientists and researchers were still searching in the dark for the world’s most wanted serial killer. Unable to infiltrate and breach the bases of mosquito-borne disease, the newly minted National Board of Health had no way of knowing that it was this same cherished and coveted commerce that sparked the mosquito’s postwar rampage. The southern scourge of yellow fever centered on skyrocketing American (and global) trade, its expanding and snaking transportation infrastructure, including a latticework of railways, and the last great spike of immigration to the United States.

While the Civil War had churned up fallow fields, cotton plantations, which had stagnated during the war, were rebooted and enlarged with former slaves, now styled as sharecroppers. The military-industrial complex that had fueled the Union during the Civil War was refashioned and pumped out exportable manufactured goods. Increased global traffic once again descended on southern ports. For the mosquito, and her diseases of yellow fever, malaria, and dengue, the South was reopened for business. The postwar influx of immigrants added to the misery by importing their own brands of the disease. Endemic malaria, for example, which had been absent for decades, was reintroduced across New England.

The Civil War had reinvigorated the mosquito, and while malaria continued its wreckage during the immediate peace, yellow fever was reenergized as well. “American progress was the virus’s other ally. A great influx of immigrants—Irish, German, eastern European—had been migrating south since the Civil War,” confirms Molly Caldwell Crosby. “They served as fuel for a fever fire, a fresh source of nonimmune blood for the virus. Transportation paved the way for these immigrants. Trains connected every corner of America for the first time—east to west, north to south.” By 1878, as the South was heaving and retching with yellow fever, more than 80,000 miles of railway track was operational in the US. At the turn of the century, 260,000 miles stretched across the country, reaching 410,000 miles only fifteen years later. This massive growth of railways and other infrastructure was built to propel swelling American economic portfolios into the global market.

The railways also eased the frontier passage west for land-hungry settlers. In its own backyard, the United States continued its western economic drive of Manifest Destiny and the subjugation of indigenous peoples. The “Iron Horse” ferried increasing numbers of “sod-busting” pioneers, fortune-seeking miners, and their bodyguard US Cavalry to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, where they came face-to-face with proud and defiant indigenous peoples who were willing to fight to defend their homelands. Cavalrymen and paid assassins, such as William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, exterminated the bison, their livelihood, and battled, slaughtered, and forcefully removed the starving, straggling remnants to bleak reservations.

Along the wagon trails and train tracks, malaria plodded west with the homesteaders and thrived on the new frontier, making frequent guest appearances in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical novel Little House on the Prairie depicting her childhood in 1870s Independence, Kansas. Roughly 10% of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry, for example, was suffering from malaria when they were routed by the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. While this encounter may have been “Custer’s Last Stand,” in a sense, it was also the last stand of American indigenous autonomy. The Sioux won the battle, but with their massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, they lost the war, sealing the fate of indigenous peoples across the United States. This internal economic expansion of the United States at the expense of indigenous peoples generated a thirst for overseas ports and resources to feed domestic industry and foreign exports.

Rapid escalation of commerce and trade was coupled to the collection of a sprawling American colonial checkerboard. This era of American expansion announced a permanent departure from President James Monroe’s 1823 isolationist doctrine.* American imperialism set off a sweeping chain of events, which continued through both world wars. During the century between the conclusion of the War of 1812 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the United States drastically expanded its territorial footprint, securing Florida, the remainder of the west beyond the Rocky Mountains, Alaska, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, eastern Samoa, the Philippines, and the Panama Canal.

As the American economic tentacles of empire reached across the Caribbean, the Pacific Rim, and beyond, Europe took its last clumsy imperialistic steps in Africa and the East Indies. From the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, European nations generally licked their wounds, remained cordial, and peacefully carved up the rest of the unclaimed world. With the Western Hemisphere being gathered to and embraced by the American sphere of influence, European imperialism, with the aid of quinine, shifted away from the Americas to Africa. A great game of mercantile Monopoly and military Risk was simultaneously played out across the “dark continent,” periodically seeping into India, central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Far East.

It was within these final moves of the last global imperial scramble that the mosquito was finally unmasked. The clandestine and murderous agent of filariasis, malaria, and yellow fever, among her other vehicles of assassination, would, at long last, be revealed. Like most scientific invention and technological innovation, exposing the mosquito as the cause of contagion was directly tied to capitalism in the British colonies of India and Hong Kong and the French outpost of Algeria, and to conflict with the American invasion of Cuba.

Beginning in the 1870s, American entrepreneurs and capital poured into Cuba, and the island was slowly bought up by American corporations, progressively fraying its economic ties to Spain. As early as 1820, Thomas Jefferson contemplated that Cuba would be “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States” and reasoned that America “ought, at the first opportunity, to take Cuba.” In fact, Spain had rejected offers from five US presidents—Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, Grant, and McKinley—to purchase the island. A similar commercial Americanization was also materializing on the independent Hawaiian Islands. Seeing as both Cuba and Hawaii were not territories of the United States, aggrieved American plantation owners were charged tariffs on their “foreign goods” at American ports. Despite these import duties, by 1877 the United States purchased a staggering 83% of Cuban exports (yellow fever was the one Cuban import that had no tariff).

In the decades following the Civil War, the American industrial economy boomed. By 1900, the United States was the global leader in manufactured goods, which accounted for almost half of total American exports. While American natural resources were certainly richly abundant, and Canada outfitted its southern neighbor with most shortfalls, both countries lacked rubber, silk, a sizable sugar industry, and other tropical commodities. The swelling shipping fleets facilitating this relatively quick expansion of American trade also required coaling stations and naval protection. American capitalism needed mercantilist colonies. Uncle Sam’s lusting eyes wandered toward the volatile, wayward Spanish colony of Cuba, which had been consumed by insurrection against imperial rule since 1868.

Cuba benefited directly from Toussaint Louverture’s successful mosquito-backed slave revolt in Haiti. The financial price, or punishment, for Haiti’s prized freedom in 1804 was the destruction of its plantations and its blacklisting as a global economic pariah. Filling this commercial pecuniary vacuum, Cuba quickly unseated and supplanted Haiti as the largest sugar producer in the world (half the global supply), while emerging as a main exporter of tobacco and coffee. As investments and wealth flooded the island, Havana with its majestic seafront promenade quickly blossomed into an ethnic melting pot, a playground for multinational elites, and a cosmopolitan mecca rivaling the glitz and glamour of New York. Although numerous revolts against the lingering Spanish rule occurred throughout the nineteenth century, they lacked cohesion and foreign support and were brutally suppressed by the Spanish and their Cuban-born political puppets.

Beginning in 1868, however, protracted insurrection became a mainstay on the island, during which time a large segment of slaves, who accounted for roughly 40% of the population, secured freedom. Spain responded by pumping in hefty contingents of fresh, unseasoned troops. Unlike many other Caribbean islands, Cuba was home to a healthy diaspora of its colonizing Spanish peoples and their descendants, who made up the largest segment of the total 1.7 million population. Between 1865 and 1895, over 500,000 Spanish immigrants settled in Cuba. The high rate of new arrivals, sojourners of fortune, and Spanish soldiers to Cuba kept the notoriously lethal Cuban mosquitoes well stocked with virgin blood. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, virulent annual epidemics of yellow fever consumed the island, with a death toll reaching 60,000.

When slavery was banned in 1886, the wealthy Spanish-Cuban elite saw their profits plummet. The rise of the global sugar beet industry, founded by Napoleon’s France after the loss of Haiti, as mentioned, also cut into sugar revenues. Floundering economically, Spain instituted taxation policies on Cuba similar to those enacted by the British on the American colonies prior to the revolution. Spain put the financial squeeze on Cuba, its last bastion of colonial commerce, by levying augmented taxes and withholding voting and legal privileges from the Spanish-Cuban population. Americans could certainly understand why the Cubans revolted against this tyrannical Spanish rule crowned with burdensome taxation, imposed without colonial consent or political representation. The Cuban plight was something Americans could rally around to serve their own imperialistic agenda. With both foreign and domestic support swelling, the Cuban “Sons of Liberty,” many brought up in the shadows and stories of Simon Bolivar’s struggles for freedom, slowly began to gather strength and numbers. In 1895, full-scale rebellion broke out in Cuba.

Over the course of hostilities, roughly 230,000 Spanish soldiers led by General Valeriano “the Butcher” Weyler ruthlessly fought to suppress the insurgency. Rural peasants were rounded up for “reconcentration” and quartered in hastily built, overcrowded camps. Crops and livestock were confiscated or cleansed, and the countryside and villages were put to the torch. By 1896, over a third of Cuba’s entire population had been relocated to these concentration camps, with 150,000, nearly 10% of the island’s population, dying of disease. Of the 45,000 Spanish military deaths, over 90% were caused by disease, primarily yellow fever and malaria. By January 1898, of the 110,000 remaining Spanish troops, 60% were incapacitated by mosquito-borne disease. As mutinous Cuban mosquitoes continued to devour Spanish troops with no tangible military results, opposition to the war intensified on the home front. “After having sent 200,000 men and having spilt so much blood,” decried the leader of the Spanish opposition party, “we are masters in the island only of the territory upon which our soldiers stand.” Unseasoned reinforcements sent directly from Spain were torn apart by the mosquito within weeks of landing. Spanish hospital admissions for mosquito-borne disease reached 900,000—multiple admissions per man.

The architects of the revolution understood that yellow fever, malaria, and dengue were their formidable allies, praising “June, July and August” as their most distinguished generals, with September and October receiving honorable mention. For the seasoned Cubans, only 30% of their 4,000 military deaths were caused by these same diseases. According to J. R. McNeill, the revolutionary leaders “goaded the Spaniards into unpopular policies, courted foreign support—especially in the U.S.—and, most of all, used their mobility to avoid Spanish forces except when they found patrols in vulnerable situations. Thus they kept the rebellion alive, like Washington, Toussaint, and Bolivar before them, and emerged victorious because time and the ‘climate’ was on their side.”

The American press, led by rival New York media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, used Weyler’s atrocities to mobilize validation for war against Spain (and sell newspapers), inflaming American public opinion toward intervention. President William McKinley accused the Spanish of waging a “war of extermination.” More importantly, American entrepreneurs, drooling at the thought of the annexation of Cuba, pleaded for conflict resolution. The war was increasingly bleeding their personal fortunes and diminishing profit while also draining the larger American economy by slashing plantation production, harrying shipping, and sheering away local labor.

After American arbitration efforts were sneered at by the Spanish, the battle cruiser USS Maine was sent to Havana Harbor to protect American shipping, property, profit, and other economic assets. In February 1898, a mysterious explosion, blamed on a Spanish mine, rocked the Maine and killed 266 sailors.* The infuriated American public, stirred to a frenzy by sensationalized reporting, demanded action under the popular slogan “Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!” By April 1898, the US Navy initiated a blockade of the island, and Congress issued a declaration of war against Spain and her colonies. When the first Americans waded ashore in late June at the onset of mosquito season, only 25% of the Spanish force of 200,000 was healthy enough to fight. “It is something awful to see,” reported the Spanish surgeon in chief from Cuba. “Those ignorant, sickly peasants brought here from Spain to defend the Spanish flag are dying by the hundreds every day.” The Americans, however, were also bitten by Cuba’s legendary mosquitoes.

After his chain of superiors was killed or incapacitated by yellow fever, a fresh-faced and eager Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly assumed command of his regiment. Roosevelt’s fortuitous mosquito-influenced battlefield promotion would thrust him into the national spotlight. “The battle that was to follow at San Juan Hill,” writes David Petriello, “was to propel the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy to the presidency, a situation only made possible by the illness that upset the pre-established command structure.” In truth, when Colonel Roosevelt and his small detachment of volunteer Rough Riders walked up the hill, they were greeted by Lieutenant John “Black Jack” Pershing and a group of African American “Buffalo Soldiers” who had already crested the summit and scattered its defenders. Nevertheless, Roosevelt boastingly exaggerated his battlefield prowess to reporters and grabbed national headlines.

The war in Cuba lasted only a few months, attaining a reputation as a “Splendid Little War.” The quick American victory was secured by 23,000 total troops at a cost of only 379 servicemen killed in combat. Another 4,700, however, died of mosquito-borne disease. When these shocking casualty returns filtered back to Washington, it was quickly understood by politicians and investors that the mosquito was the paramount obstacle to unlocking the economic potential of Cuba and incorporating its riches into the larger American mercantilist market. This dire situation of life-sucking mosquito-borne disease was not lost on military men with boots on the ground, guiding strategy in Cuba either. Prolonged military involvement on the island would be tantamount to mosquito-inflicted suicide. Dislodging the Spanish was one thing; contesting the mosquito with an army of occupation was quite another. Help, however, would soon be on the way.

America’s initial voyages of imperialism during the Spanish-American War were tied to epidemiology and forever altered the global world order. Science and technological innovation gave us new weapons in our war with the mosquito. She could no longer fly below the radar. The ancient miasma theory, which had been the prevailing school of thought for the cause of disease for over 3,000 years, was now expunged and flushed out of circulation. Like most historical events, the discovery of the mosquito as the vector for multiple contagions, including filariasis, malaria, and yellow fever, was tied directly to global empire, mercantilism, and capitalism in Cuba, Panama, and beyond.

By the 1880s, the miasma and humoral models of Hippocratic medicine were being replaced with modern germ theories. Early researchers of mosquito-borne disease were operating under the scientific umbrella of the germ theory postulated and proven by Louis Pasteur (French), Robert Koch (German), and Joseph Lister (British) beginning in the 1850s.* Advancements in science and medical instruments, including the microscope, allowed for a more complete and advanced study of disease. The mosquito and her pathogens could no longer hide in the shadows of scientific simplicity and medical ignorance. Of course, boasting a planet-consuming population of 110 trillion, mosquitoes had never actually attempted to be clandestine or inconspicuous. After all, they have been flying in our face for eternity.

In the decades following the monumental discovery of the germ or microorganism theory of disease, a handful of mosquito hunters finally cornered her and broadcast to the world that at last our ultimate, previously indestructible, enemy had been arraigned for her crimes against humanity stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. With numerous medical bounty hunters pursuing her across the planet, arresting the mosquito was a collective international effort.

After millions of years of discreetly smuggling misery and death, the mosquito was unmasked in a swift series of scientific discoveries. First, in 1877, British physician Patrick Manson positively incriminated the mosquito as the vector of filariasis, or elephantiasis, while stationed at the British outpost of Hong Kong. For the first time in history, Manson had definitively coupled an insect to the transmission of disease. Although lacking corroborating scientific evidence, Manson then postulated that the mosquito also delivered malaria.

Three years later in 1880, while peering through his crude microscope, Dr. Alphonse Laveran, a French military physician assigned to the colony of Algeria, noticed something strange. Small spherical foreign bodies were swimming in the blood sample of a patient admitted with “marsh fever.” Upon further study, he correctly identified these bodies as four distinct forms in the life cycle of the malaria parasite. By 1884, he theorized that the mosquito was the method of delivery for this biological killer. Similarly, an American physician and veteran of the Civil War (serving as a surgeon for both sides) with the dazzling name Albert Freeman Africanus King implicated the mosquito in 1882, boldly suggesting, “You can have mosquitoes without malaria . . . but you cannot have malaria without mosquitoes.” King’s flawless assertion was rejected and ridiculed when he posited that Washington, DC, should be enclosed by a 600-foot-tall mosquito safety net.* The discoveries of Manson, King, and Laveran kick-started the field of malariology, leading to what historian James Webb calls a “trio of discoveries in 1897” by Ronald Ross, Giovanni Grassi, and our germ theorist Robert Koch.

Ronald Ross was a rather uninspiring British doctor born in India to a general in the British Army. Ross was an altogether improbable and dubious candidate to expose the preeminent killer of humankind. To appease his father, he grudgingly attended medical school, but he spent most of his time procrastinating, writing plays and novellas, and otherwise daydreaming. Ross did so poorly on his exams that when he graduated in 1881, his credentials allowed him to practice medicine only in British India, where he spent the next thirteen years bouncing from one assignment to another. On a brief trip to London in 1894, he met Manson, who took the lackluster young doctor under his wing and mentored him on his own malaria research. Given India’s endemic malaria, Manson prodded Ross to return to his post to produce concrete evidence of his own malaria-mosquito theory. “If you succeed in this, you will go up like a shot and get any facilities you may ask for,” he told his young apprentice and squire. “Look on it as the Holy Grail and yourself as a Sir Galahad.” Upon his return to India, Ross immediately made the hospital rounds, stalking malaria patients.

He spent the next three years with his face buried in a microscope, squinting at dissected mosquitoes. His research notes and his descriptions of what he was spying through the lens indicate that, for the most part, he did not know what the hell he was looking at or looking for. He hated the natural sciences and had no clue about the actual biological workings of mosquitoes. His original mosquito experiments, for example, were conducted on species that did not and could not vector malaria. He complained that these mosquito test subjects were “obstinate as mules” for refusing to bite, which is akin to scolding a chestnut as lazy for refusing to fall. In the meantime, an Italian zoologist, Giovanni Grassi, was also persistently poking and prodding mosquitoes to unveil the malaria parasite that inflicted endemic misery and death across his country.

In 1897, both Ross and Grassi finally had their “aha” breakthrough moments. Ross discovered that mosquitoes were the vector for avian malaria and postulated with insufficient evidence from ongoing trials that the same must be true for human malaria. Grassi beat Ross to the finish line by conclusively proving that the Anopheles mosquito was the distributer of human malaria. These simultaneous discoveries set off a professional feud and smear campaign between the two men comparable to that of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla in the early twentieth century.* Much to Grassi’s anger and resentment, Ross’s public relations campaign prevailed, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1902, with Laveran accompanying him in 1907.

The last of the trio of 1897 discoveries belonged to Robert Koch, who won the Nobel Prize in 1905. Working out of the malaria-plagued colony of German East Africa, the distinguished bacteriologist scientifically confirmed that quinine cleansed human blood of the malaria parasite as had been championed for 250 years since it allegedly first cured the beautiful countess of Chinchon in Peru. “These three epochal discoveries struck a destabilizing blow to miasmatic theory,” Webb concludes. “In the years after 1897 the theory of miasma was dead in the water.”

Mosquito-borne malaria, the cause of limitless and unrivaled suffering and billions of deaths since the dawn of humankind, was exposed. Our nameless archnemesis that had been stalking us since our creation had finally been unmasked. This lethal bond between the mosquito and the scourge of malaria was laid bare by the collective weight of science. With the cause of this affront to humanity revealed, surely a foolproof treatment or vaccine would quickly follow. Or alternatively, this verminous abomination, destroyer of worlds, could be exterminated. After all, malaria was caused only by the small, worthless mosquito. Right?

With this realization, the mosquito was the subject of intense study and scrutiny. If she was the sole delivery system for filariasis and malaria, what other deadly poisons did she discharge from her proboscis? And though her lethal yellow fever viral weaponry remained undetected for the time being, with the mosquito attracting so much scientific scrutiny, it too could not hide forever. Embroiled with both the Spanish and yellow fever in Cuba since April 1898, to reap the whirlwind of the island’s capitalistic opportunity, the Americans needed to defang the dreaded Black Vomit once and for all.

Witnessing the destructive power of yellow fever on his troops in Cuba, the American commander General William Shafter declared that the mosquito was “a thousand times harder to stand up against than the missiles of the enemy.” With the Spanish surrender in August 1898 after only four months of combat, military commanders realized the inherent dangers of maintaining an occupation force in Cuba. Yellow fever and malaria began to spread among US troops. In a letter to President McKinley, Shafter reported that his force was “an army of convalescents” with 75% unfit for service.

A second straightforward letter signed by numerous generals (and Colonel Roosevelt) known as the “Round Robin” candidly forewarned Congress, “If we are kept here it will in all human possibility mean an appalling disaster, for the surgeons here estimate that over half the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die.” The dispatch closed with the blunt caveat: “This army must be moved at once or it will perish. As an army it can be safely moved now. Persons responsible for preventing such a move will be responsible for the unnecessary loss of thousands of lives.” While US forces made short work of Cuba’s Spanish defenders, they hastily retreated in the face of the mosquito’s mauling barrage of malaria and yellow fever. The evacuation of US forces was initiated in mid-August. “Cuba became a U.S. dependency until 1902. Thereafter it was nominally free . . . thanks to yellow fever and malaria,” concludes J. R. McNeill. “Cubans have lionized their heroes. Americans venerated theirs, and elected one, Theodore Roosevelt, to the presidency before carving his likeness on Mt. Rushmore. There are no monuments to mosquitoes, far and away the most lethal foe of the Spanish army in Cuba.” The mosquito also spared Cuba from outright American annexation, instigating nearly a century of hostile relations and harrowing events.

With mosquito-borne disease hindering any American military occupation, Cuba was given formal independence in 1902 under a puppet government answerable to Washington. Underwriting this token independence were furtive fine-print clauses. Cuba was forbidden to form alliances with other countries, America retained the first right of refusal for all trade, economic portfolios, and infrastructure contracts, maintained the right to militarily intervene at its choosing, and secured perpetual possession of Guantanamo Bay. Under the new American-backed regime, Cuba became a dictatorial banana republic and an American economic and self-indulgent epicurean playground at the expense of the impoverished Cuban people.

In 1959, socialist revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara put an end to the US-sponsored authoritarian rule and corrupt regime of President Fulgencio Batista, and quickly aligned themselves as a communist satellite of the Soviet Union. President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion using CIA-trained counterrevolutionaries was a disaster. “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” the president remarked while accepting full responsibility for the fiasco. The botched mission drove Cuba further into the Soviet embrace, leading to the near-apocalyptic Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Although cool heads prevailed, and rational dialogue eventually deescalated the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the global population held its breath for thirteen nail-biting days as the planet teetered on the eve of destruction. It took over fifty years for US-Cuban relations to begin to normalize, under President Barack Obama.

The Spanish-American War, however, was not isolated to Cuba. It seeped across the Pacific to the Spanish colony of the Philippines, where the American Navy crushed its Spanish opponent in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. American forces simultaneously landed at Puerto Rico, Guam, and Hawaii. Japan, a burgeoning industrial and military power, watched uneasily as America expanded its influence across the Pacific Rim. President McKinley assured the world that despite its imperialistic veneer, “the American Flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire territory but for Humanity’s sake.” The global Spanish-American War officially ended with the American capture of the Philippine capital city, Manila, on August 13, 1898.

“Hit Him Hard!: President McKinley: “Mosquitoes seem to be worse here in the Philippines than they were in Cuba.” The American invasions of Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War highlighted the perils of foreign imperialistic forays into the tropics. This February 1899 cartoon from Judge magazine mocking President McKinley depicts Cuban and Filipino insurgents as lethal and stubborn mosquitoes. The 1898 American invasion of Cuba, however, also led to the unmasking of the Aedes mosquito as the cause of yellow fever by the US Army Yellow Fever Commission headed by Dr. Walter Reed. (Library of Congress)

Following the Spanish surrender in the Philippines, President McKinley announced that “there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.” Instead, American occupation forces initiated their own brutal and barbaric cleansing and “reconcentration” of Filipino civilians, mimicking the counterinsurgency tactics of General Weyler in Cuba. One American general, who was later court-martialed, ordered his men to execute every Filipino male over the age of ten. The media, however, publicly spun President McKinley’s words “that the official mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”

During this forgotten Philippine-American War, Filipino revolutionaries, who had been combating Spanish colonial occupation since 1896, fought a guerrilla war against American forces until 1902. They wanted independence from any and all foreign powers. William Taft, governor general of the Philippines and future US president, argued that it would take a century of blood before the Filipinos could be taught to appreciate “what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.” Eventually, reports of American atrocities could no longer be contained or censored. The widely circulated weekly magazine the Nation reported on the not so “splendid” or “little” war that had degenerated “into a war of conquest, characterized by rapine and cruelty worthy of savages.” During its first deployment of troops outside the Western Hemisphere, the United States poured more than 126,000 men into the Philippines.* Of the roughly 4,500 who died, 75% perished from disease, including malaria and dengue. Over the course of the brutal three-year war, the best estimates place the total Filipino death toll at 300,000 as a result of combat, murder, starvation and disease, and the squalor of the concentration camps. The Philippines remained under American (or Japanese) jurisdiction in some form until it was finally granted complete independence in 1946.*

The Spanish-American War did more than carve out a global American empire. It also led to the unmasking of the mosquito as the vector for yellow fever. When American forces invaded Cuba in 1898, the military men, physicians, and politicians steering the war fully understood the threat posed by yellow fever. Cuba had rightfully earned a notorious reputation as a catacomb for mosquito-borne disease. Given that the mosquito-malaria mystery had been unraveled a year earlier, numerous leading researchers also fingered the mosquito as the merchant of yellow fever. In 1881, Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor educated in France and the US, isolated the Aedes mosquito as the vector for yellow fever, though acknowledging at the time that his experiments were inconclusive. The mosquito remained innocent until scientifically proven guilty.

The American architects of the war dissected the medical reports pouring in from Cuba with great interest and anxiety. They recognized that, as in the past, Cuban mosquitoes could manipulate the destiny of American designs on the island. The task of combating yellow fever, an enemy far more lethal than the Spanish, landed on the shoulders of Dr. Walter Reed.

Reed earned his medical degree in 1869 at the age of seventeen. He enlisted in the US Army Medical Corps in 1875 and was predominantly posted to units across the western frontier engaged in pacifying, slaughtering, and relocating indigenous populations. Reed tended both American soldiers and indigenous peoples, including the famed Apache Geronimo. In 1893, as a professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy, Reed joined the newly created Army Medical School, where he was able to conduct unhindered research of his own choosing. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he was posted to Cuba to investigate an epidemic of typhoid fever, which he concluded was the result of contact with fecal matter or food and drink contaminated by flies. During his stay in Cuba, however, he became more interested in yellow fever, which was buckling American troops at an alarming rate. In June 1900, Reed was appointed to establish and head the US Army Yellow Fever Commission. Reed was an avid fan of Carlos Finlay’s résumé, and Finlay’s body of work formed the basis for Reed’s own research.

Although his four-member team in Cuba, made up of himself, another American, a Canadian, and a Cuban, received full backing from their military superiors, the media maligned his theory that the mosquito transmitted the disease. An article in The Washington Post, for example, mocked, “Of all the silly and nonsensical rigamarole of yellow fever that has yet found its way into print—and there has been enough to build a fleet—the silliest beyond compare is to be found in the arguments and theories generated by a mosquito hypothesis.” In October 1900, after conducting trials with human test subjects, many of whom died, including one of his team members, Reed announced that he had scientifically and definitively unmasked the female Aedes mosquito as the cause of yellow fever, while identifying the cyclical time frame of contagion between humans and mosquitoes.* General Leonard Wood, a physician and the US governor of Cuba, acknowledged and applauded that “the confirmation of Dr. Finlay’s doctrine is the greatest step forward made in medical science since Jenner’s discovery of the [smallpox] vaccination.” Walter Reed received credit and fame (and numerous institutions named in his honor) for apprehending the killer Aedes mosquito. Prior to his premature death in 1902 from complications of a ruptured appendix, however, he publicly shared recognition with his team and with his hero and mentor, Carlos Finlay.*

Following Reed’s announcement, the chief military sanitary officer in Havana, Dr. William Gorgas, energetically set out to rid the island of yellow fever through a systematic and deliberate mosquito sanitation and extermination program. Gorgas, who survived yellow fever as a youth in Texas, was not connected to the “Reed Board” nor was he a research scientist. He was a military doctor who fanatically carried out his orders to destroy yellow fever in Havana. Gorgas first meticulously mapped the city and surrounds before deploying more than 300 men in six teams working around the clock to execute his equally meticulous war on Havana’s mosquitoes. These “sanitation squads” attacked the finicky breeding patterns and limited flight range of Aedes mosquitoes by draining ponds and swamps, limiting standing water and open barrels, erecting netting, clear-cutting targeted vegetation, fumigating with sulfur and insecticidal chrysanthemum-pyrethrum powder, and spraying all unreachable or suspect locations with a coat of pyrethrum-laced kerosene on top of other wholesale sanitation measures throughout the city. For the first time since 1648, thanks to the keen determination of Gorgas, yellow fever was completely eradicated from Havana by 1902. After the last American outbreak in New Orleans in 1905, “cleanup crews” reoccupied Cuba and by 1908 the entire country was released from the clutches of yellow fever. Malaria and dengue, however, continued to prowl the island.

The actual yellow fever virus, however, was not isolated until 1927. Under sponsorship of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, successful vaccination was realized a decade later in 1937, courtesy of South African American Max Theiler. In 1951, when accepting his Nobel Prize for this accomplishment, Theiler was asked what he was going to do with his prize money. He answered, “Buy a case of scotch and watch the Dodgers.” Yellow fever was defanged and stripped of its monumental impact on geopolitical affairs. The curtain was drawn on its career as a feared and adroit killer and as a mettlesome and influential agent of human history. Malaria, however, proved to be an indefatigable survivor and determined enemy.

Following the American military extraction from Cuba and his own successful Cuban mosquito crusade, Gorgas was superseded as the island’s chief health officer by none other than Dr. Carlos Finlay. Gorgas’s unique talents and eradication expertise were required elsewhere. He had been summoned to conjure his mosquito-silencing, abracadabra magic on the historically lethal mosquitoes of Panama. Having already overpowered and dispatched the Spanish, English, Scottish, and French, the undefeated Panamanian mosquito next challenged the confident United States, managed by its headstrong president, Teddy Roosevelt, for Canal Zone supremacy. “If we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy we must build up our power without borders,” announced the dynamic young president. “We must build the Isthmian canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the east and west.” To make its newly acquired Pacific colonies, including the Philippines, Guam, Samoa, Hawaii, and chains of smaller atolls and islands, financially viable and to fuse its newly created global empire, America needed to punch a forty-eight-mile canal through Panama. This shortcut linking the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans would supplant the perilous, time-consuming, big-ticket journey around the tip of South America at Cape Horn. Teddy was adamant that where the Spanish, English, Scottish, and French had failed, the Americans would succeed in constructing an economic superhighway across the isthmus. His demanding order to his engineers was simply “Make the dirt fly!”

This idea was not innovative, but the engineering and mosquito control were. The first Spanish attempt to blaze a trail across Panama at Darien in 1534 was rebuffed by the mosquito. Ensuing Spanish colonial attempts met the same disease-ridden destiny. After they had sacrificed over 40,000 men to the mosquito, their painstaking efforts produced little more than a grubby single-lane mule track through the jungle, bracketed by two languid, fever-drenched villages. The mosquito thwarted an English attempt in 1668 before writing the Scottish script for William Paterson’s Darien horror show in 1698, climaxing with the forfeiture of Scotland’s independence.

In 1882, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the vaunted French engineer who had completed the Suez Canal in 1869, tried to repeat his success in Panama. He bribed government officials and lured investors to back his project. The French effort foundered in mud and mosquitoes. While battling malaria after a visit to Panama in 1887, French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin recalled the skeletal bushwhacking workers being “devoured by mosquitoes.” The popular magazine Harper’s Weekly ran the headline “Is M. de Lesseps a Canal Digger or a Grave Digger?” Nearly 85% of the workforce suffered from mosquito-borne disease. Over 23,000 men (25% of the personnel) died, primarily from yellow fever, before the project, nearing 40% completion, was abandoned in 1889 amid bankruptcy and scandal. A total of $300 million from over 800,000 investors had been gobbled up by Panamanian mosquitoes. Numerous politicians and contractors were convicted of collusion and corruption, including Gustave Eiffel, who had recently unveiled his tower at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair for the centennial celebration of the Storming of the Bastille.

To procure the rights to the Canal Zone, the United States, using gunboat diplomacy while militarily buttressing local revolutionaries, chiseled out the independent country of Panama from Colombia. In 1903, the United States recognized the sovereign Republic of Panama, and two weeks later, America was granted permanent exclusive domain over the ten-mile-wide strip, the Canal Zone. The Americans took up the gauntlet in 1904, armed with the newly discovered knowledge that mosquitoes spread deadly diseases. In transit to the unfinished French ditch, Gorgas was admonished by a local: “A White man’s a fool to go there and a bigger fool to stay.” Fresh from his successful eradication campaign in Cuba, Gorgas and 4,100 workers systematically eradicated yellow fever from the Canal Zone.

Gorgas and his sanitation squads used the same systems that had destroyed the Aedes mosquito in Cuba, as well as new trial-and-error eradication techniques. According to Sonia Shah, the sanitation “blitzkrieg” consumed “the entire U.S. supply of sulphur, pyrethrum, and kerosene oil.” Twenty-one quinine dispensaries flanking the canal also doled out daily preventive doses to most workers. By 1906, two years into construction, yellow fever completely disappeared, and malaria rates had fallen by 90%. Although Gorgas lamented that “We did not get rid of malaria on the Isthmus of Panama, as we did in Cuba,” he understood the immense significance of his work. In 1905, the canal had a death rate three times higher than the continental United States. Upon completion in 1914, it had a death rate half that of the US. Officially, 5,609 workers (out of 60,000 total) died of disease and injury from 1904 through 1914. The canal was unlocked to traffic only days after the outbreak of the First World War on August 4, 1914.

“Make the Dirt Fly!”: Innovative and effective mosquito control in Panama under Dr. William Gorgas allowed the Americans to succeed where the mosquito-chased Spanish, British, Scottish, and French had failed in constructing a Panama Canal. American efforts under President Theodore Roosevelt began in 1904, and the canal was opened to traffic in 1914. Here a member of a Sanitation Squad sprays oil on mosquito breeding grounds, Panama, 1906. (Library of Congress)

In light of the discoveries made by Manson, Ross, Grassi, Reed, and Gorgas, among others, countries around the world established national health departments, schools of tropical medicine, benefactors for scientific research like the Rockefeller Foundation, departments of military hygiene, army nursing corps, sanitation commissions, public waste disposal infrastructure, and codified health laws. In his exploration of the impacts of mosquito control during the construction of the Panama Canal, Paul Sutter reports that “it was the commercial and military expansion of the United States into tropical Latin America and the Asian Pacific that most forcefully connected federal entomological expertise to public health campaigns. Indeed, these imperial campaigns helped to build federal public health capacity and to reframe disease control . . . as a federal issue during the early twentieth century.” The United States was joined by a host of other countries in framing national health as being not only a civilian priority (or perhaps even a legal right) but a military necessity as well. The mosquito was at the top of everyone’s hit list.

The construction of the Panama Canal secured American economic domination and naval supremacy.* “Effective control of malaria and yellow fever,” acknowledges J. R. McNeill, “changed the balance of power in the Americas and the world.” The scales of global power tipped toward a growing industrial, economic, and military American superpower. While Teddy Roosevelt opened new American economic frontiers, his policies also thrust the United States headlong into the great game of world politics. He personally played a hand at this international gaming table, winning the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a settlement to the Russo-Japanese War.

The decisive Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 shocked global observers and marked a turning point in world history. It was the first major military triumph of an Asian power over a European power since the Mongol war machine crafted by Genghis Khan 700 years earlier. Japan seemingly arrived on the world stage out of nowhere. Formerly an introverted and reticent nation, Japan sought to modernize, industrialize, and join the currents of global commerce. The United States was now also positioned as a Pacific power, no longer confined to Atlantic waters since the colonial prize winnings of the Spanish-American War and the Panama Canal. Japan resented American economic encroachment on the Pacific Rim. In need of petroleum, rubber, tin, and other resources, the nation of islands eventually aimed to carve out its own imperial “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” just as the United States had done during the turn-of-the-century era of America. Conflict between the two vying Pacific nations remained dormant, for now.

In addition to the colonial spoils from the Spanish-American War, the United States used the conflict as an excuse to annex Hawaii. In 1893, a group of American plantation owners, entrepreneurs, and investors, aided by US Marines, overthrew the traditional Hawaiian government and placed Queen Lili’uokalani under house arrest, forcing her to abdicate the throne two years later. The aim of these American conspirators was simple. Like Cuba, Hawaii under American jurisdiction meant foreign tariffs on their sugar bounty unloaded at American ports would no longer apply. Proponents of annexation argued that Hawaii was a strategically vital economic and military bastion and a prerequisite to promote and protect American interests in Asia. Despite the objection from most indigenous Hawaiians, Congress voted to officially annex the Territory of Hawaii in 1898 shortly after the outbreak of war with Spain. The following year, the United States established a permanent naval base at Pearl Harbor.