Carlos Finlay

A Cuban physician and epidemiologist who in 1881 first proposed that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes, identifying the species now known as Aedes aegypti as the specific carrier. His theory was met with skepticism and even ridicule when he presented it at the 1881 International Sanitary Conference, and it remained largely dismissed for almost twenty years until the United States Army's Walter Reed Commission confirmed it around 1900, work in which Reed himself credited Finlay's earlier discovery. The American military governor of Cuba, General Leonard Wood, called the confirmation the greatest step forward in medical science since Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine, and the mosquito control measures the finding made possible allowed the construction of the Panama Canal to proceed without the catastrophic mortality that had doomed earlier attempts.