William Gorgas

A United States Army physician who served as the twenty second Surgeon General of the Army from 1914 to 1918, and who is best remembered for eliminating yellow fever and sharply reducing malaria in Havana and at the Panama Canal by controlling the mosquitoes that spread them. Applying Carlos Finlay's theory of mosquito borne transmission, Gorgas organized large scale sanitation campaigns, draining standing water, fumigating buildings and installing mosquito netting, over the objections of officials who doubted the mosquito theory at first; in Havana, yellow fever cases fell from 784 to zero within a single year. His success in controlling disease at the Panama Canal construction site is widely credited with making the canal's completion possible, after mosquito-borne disease had helped defeat an earlier French effort to build it. Gorgas served as president of the American Medical Association and received the first Public Welfare Medal in 1914.