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abolitionist movement to set them free. One ahead-of-his-time British planter suggested that rethinking the slavery “brand” would solve the problem. Call them “plantation assistants,” he suggested, and abolitionists would stop complaining. No one yet realized that with a free Haiti as an example, slavery was finished in the Western Hemisphere. Abolitionist pressure killed British slavery in 1838. The American Civil War drove a stake through the heart of American slavery in 1865. No one thanked yellow fever for starting the revolution.

Define fiasco
    Even after the demise of slavery, yellow fever continued to have an impact on the New World. In 1881, French engineers began construction of a sea-level canal through the Isthmus of Panama. The project was led by renowned French diplomat-impresario Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had successfully managed the construction of the Suez Canal across Egypt. Unlike Egypt, however, Panama had a deadly reputation for both malaria and yellow fever. De Lesseps downplayed this problem. To reduce miasmas still thought to cause the disease, the French built tidy, clean, well-built worker barracks with elaborate ornamental gardens. Even before construction began, however, workers started dying from malaria and yellow fever. Since miasma was accounted for, a variety of sin-based explanations were proposed: drinking, gambling, even embezzling were all suspected of causing disease. One engineer, out to prove that immorality was the culprit, brought his upstanding family to Panama. Yellow fever killed them all. Finally, in 1889, with thirty thousand workers dead, billions spent, the canal unbuilt, and de Lessep’s reputation in tatters, the project was abandoned.

A good guess
    In 1880, a year before de Lesseps embarked on his Panamanian folly, Dr. Carlos Finlay suggested that
Aedes
mosquitoes might transmit yellow fever. Finlay observed that healthy humans bitten by mosquitoes that had previously fed on yellow fever sufferers also caught the disease. Finlay’s hypothesis was ignored for decades, but he was exactly right.
    In essence, a mosquito is an airborne syringe. Mosquitoes are equipped with a long hollow proboscis for drinking liquids, a tube for injecting saliva, and a set of cutting stylets for making a wound. Only females use this apparatus to drink blood, and then only when they need to nourish egg production. (For regular meals, mosquitoes drink nectar or honeydew.) When females need a blood meal, they land on a host, poke a hole through the skin, nick a capillary, inject some anticoagulant to make the blood flow, and drink up. Of the 2,500 kinds of mosquitoes, most prefer to dine on other animals. Only a small minority vampirize people. Of the deadly illnesses mosquitoes carry, only a handful affect us. But they’re doozies, including ma-laria, dengue fever, encephalitis, West Nile virus, and yellow fever. Since the Stone Age, the mosquito has probably killed more people than any other creature.

Walter Reed and Jesse dead
    In 1900, during the Spanish-American War, the mystery of yellow fever was finally unraveled. Thousands of American soldiers engaged in the conquest of Cuba had already died from yellow fever when a medical team led by Major Walter Reed arrived to try to determine the cause of the disease. Reed joined three other physicians already at work in Cuba: Jesse Lazear, Aristides Agramonte, and James Carroll. Lazear believed in Carlos Finlay’s mosquito-transmission idea. Reed was dubious but allowed Lazear to test the hypothesis. Carroll volunteered to be bitten by a mosquito that had fed on a yellow fever patient. He got sick and recovered. Needing further proof, Lazear allowed himself to be bitten. Two weeks later, he was dead. On October 23, 1900, Walter Reed announced that the
Aedes aegypti
mosquito wasthe insect vector (transmitter) for yellow fever.
    In Cuba, once the mosquito vector was confirmed, Major General William Crawford Gorgas was charged with its