On 14 August 1881, Dr. Finlay read before the Royal Academy of Medico-Physical and Natural Sciences in Havana a paper entitled "The Mosquito Hypothetically Considered as the Agent in the Transmission of Yellow Fever." This was not the first suggestion of the possibility of the mosquite as a carrier of yellow fever — Dr. Josiah Clarke Nott, of Mobile, Ala., had speculated upon the possibility as early as 1848 — but Dr. Finlay was the first to go beyond speculation to the working out of a definite theory of the method of transmission, based upon experiments with a particular species of mosquito, then called Culex fasciatus, later known as Stegomyia fasciata, and now classified as Aedes aegypti.
Dr. Finlay 's theory was not ignored — he was too respected a figure for that — but it met with almost universal disbelief, and even encountered ridicule as the theory of "that crazy Cuban doctor." For this, there were more than the usual reasons for nonacceptance of a new idea. Perhaps the most potent reason of all was the lack of positive proofs resulting from Dr. Finlay's own continued experiments in which he was never able to produce a clear-cut and undoubted case of experimental yellow fever from the bite of a mosquito. 5[1]
In the very spirit of the time, there were reasons why the Finlay mosquito theory did not receive the attention it merited. It was propounded in a period when bacteriology, in the first flush of widespread acceptance of its basic premise, was announcing with almost breathtaking frequency discoveries of new bacteria as the specific causes of particular diseases — tuberculosis among them, and tetanus, pneumonia, typhoid fever, anthrax, and diphtheria, to name a few of the scourges for which a disease-causing microorganism was found.
Naturally, the eyes of the scientific world were focused on the minute organisms which were being made visible by improved instruments and procedures, and inevitably, bacteriologists saw organisms which were taken to be the cause of yellow fever. Such "discoveries" were announced in Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba during the 1880's but further investigation by Dr. Sternberg, outstanding among American authorities on the subject, demonstrated in each instance that the supposed causative agent was not, in fact, related to yellow fever. The specific agent of the disease, according to Sternberg's report, in 1890, of his investigations carried on in Havana, Vera Cruz, and Rio de Janeiro, had not been discovered and demonstrated.
There matters stood until, in 1897, Dr. Giuseppe Sanarelli, an Italian bacteriologist of the University of Bologna, who had worked in Montevideo
- ↑ 5 ( 1 ) Symposium, pp. 96—101. Dr. Nott's suggestion as to mosquitoes was published in the New Orleans Medical Journal, volume IV, pp. 563 ff., under the title "Yellow Fever Contrasted with Bilious Fever: probably insect or animalcular origin." Dr. Finlay's theory first appeared in the Annales de la Real Academia. volume LVIII. pp. 147-169.
