Mosquito Warrior

Mosquito Warrior: Yellow Fever, Public Health, and the Forgotten Career of General William C. Gorgas

By Carol R. Byerly

The University of Alabama Press, 2024

Hardcover: $120.00; Paperback: $39.95; eBook: $39.95

Genre: Biography, History

Reviewed by Edward Journey

Alabama schoolchildren used to learn that Alabamian “William Crawford Gorgas (1854-1920) conquered yellow fever in the Panama Canal Zone” while students at the University of Alabama studied at the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library, named after William’s mother, and regularly passed the Gorgas House Museum where members of his family had lived on campus until the 1950s. Carol R. Byerly’s Mosquito Warrior: Yellow Fever, Public Health, and the Forgotten Career of General William C. Gorgas seeks in part to be a corrective to the record of Gorgas’s distinguished medical military service to the United States in the early years of the twentieth century. Byerly specializes in the history of military medicine. Her previous books, Fever of War, which documents the impact of the influenza epidemic on the military during World War I, and “Good Tuberculosis Men”: The Army Medical Department’s Struggle with Tuberculosis, feature Gorgas, so she entered the more recent project with a good grounding in her subject.

Despite being hailed and honored as a hero during his life and career, Gorgas was also the victim of a cutthroat military “contest for credit,” which continues in the historical record today. Byerly’s biography clarifies and examines these disputes while also presenting a compelling examination of Gen. Gorgas, his family, and his private, military, medical, and diplomatic life.

Gorgas’s was the exciting and fast-paced life of a medical adventurer, world traveler, and dedicated military man. The son of Josiah Gorgas, a Confederate general, and Amelia Gayle, daughter of an Alabama governor, he was present as a boy in Charleston when the first shots of the Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter. He wanted an appointment to West Point, and it is suggested that he did not get it because of his father’s service to the Confederacy. He graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and went to Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City. Gorgas’s medical training was pre-antibiotics, with germ theory only just emerging. Still, he adapted to the changes in medical practice, building up efficient and well-run hospitals wherever he was posted.

As a young army medical officer at Fort Brown, Texas, Gorgas caught yellow fever, giving him lifetime immunity. While in quarantine, he met Marie Doughty, also recovering from yellow fever. They married and forged a lifetime partnership, their shared immunity allowing them to travel and work together through all of William’s far-flung posts and assignments.

Byerly suggests that “science alone cannot conquer disease. Harnessing scientific knowledge to benefit society requires political and diplomatic skill.” Those skills are on full display during Gorgas’s tenure. He effectively uses medical diplomacy to counter political and ideological conflict and anti-American sentiment whenever he encounters it in his international assignments. Gorgas’s time in the Caribbean and in Central and South America occurs at a time when it is considered acceptable to maintain “the architecture of white supremacy” and for Gorgas to tout advances in tropical sanitation that enable “The Conquest of the Tropics for the White Race.” Indeed, the Panama Canal project was imperialist at its core.

Even so, Gorgas, a son of the Confederacy who wore the Confederate Cross on his U.S. Army uniform, declared himself an “anti-imperialist” and advocated progressivism and social reform. He subscribed to Henry George’s single-tax movement and argued that “industrial slavery” was just as unjust as “chattel slavery.” With the Panama Canal project, Gorgas advocated “some of the earliest American government welfare programs for workers.” Calling poverty the “greatest single cause” of bad sanitation and health conditions, Gorgas proposed “doubling wages” as the most effective sanitary measure in underserved communities. Gorgas’s progressive positions were solidified during his military medical work in Cuba and Panama, as well as in his travel through South America for the Rockefeller Foundation. John D. Rockefeller offered the position of director of the Rockefeller Foundation to Gorgas; Gorgas, who was reaching the end of his tenure as Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, dropped his consideration of the Rockefeller position due to impending American involvement in World War I.

As Chief Sanitary Officer, Gorgas successfully led missions to eradicate yellow fever in Havana, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone. His work was built on the discoveries by Cuban epidemiologist Carlos J. Finlay and research by U.S. Army physician Walter Reed proving the disease was transmitted by certain mosquitoes and not by infected objects. After Walter Reed’s death, his most fervent acolytes sought to wrest credit away from Gorgas and apply it to Reed. For his part, Gorgas always acknowledged the work of Finlay, Reed, and others in laying down the bases for his own considerable success.

Byerly explores the “classic tension in the military between medical officers and the line command.” This is especially true when Lt. Col. George Goethals, a West Point grad, is appointed chief engineer of the Panama Canal and chair of the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC). “The Gorgas charm,” Byerly writes, “was lost on the engineer.” One of the more intriguing conflicts between Gorgas and Goethals was a budgetary dispute over grass-cutting, with Goethals emphasizing aesthetics and Gorgas monitoring for sanitary mosquito control: “Gorgas’s sanitation employees cut grass as if people’s lives depended on it.” Subsequently, there was an ancillary struggle for social dominance in the Canal Zone between Marie Gorgas and Mrs. Goethals.

Gorgas often pressed on in the face of budgetary concerns from Washington. Among his career-long priorities was improving health care for his medical staff and the soldiers they treat. He advocated strongly for funding for soldiers’ rehab and treatment for “shell-shock” (PTSD). Gorgas was willing to go over and around his superiors to get legislation passed that would benefit his medical staff. He repeatedly argued that medical officers should have a rank appropriate to their status so that their health-related orders would be more readily heeded.

After Gorgas was “retired for age” (probably forced out) in 1918, he continued international travel in the name of public health and was honored and feted wherever he traveled. In 1920, after suffering a series of strokes in London, Gorgas was unable to attend an event at Buckingham Palace. Under the circumstances, King George V “waived protocol and came to the hospital instead,” decorating Gorgas with the Order of St. George and St. Michael for his international service.

Sir William Gorgas was known to muse about a part of his life that was “castle-building and imagery” in contrast to “the affairs of present every day life.” He called his castles “images of a better world” and continued building castles and chasing down transmissible diseases until he died. Carol Byerly’s Mosquito Warrior captures this remarkable life and laudable service in honest and exacting detail.

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).