The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [40]
In 1879, just after the devastating yellow fever epidemic in the Mississippi Valley and beyond, the group of American yellow fever experts arrived in Havana. The Havana Yellow Fever Commission consisted of several members, including the chairman, Dr. Stanley E. Chaillé of New Orleans, Dr. George M. Sternberg of the U.S. Army Medical Corps and Dr. Juan Guitéras of the Marine Hospital Service. The Spanish government assigned counterparts in Havana to work with the commission, and Dr. Carlos Finlay was a natural choice. Finlay’s international background, his congenial nature and his knowledge of tropical diseases made him a perfect fit. One member of the commission would later describe Finlay as “an original, penetrating, tenacious, untiring investigator . . . a mentor worthy of imitation by anyone with a dedicated vocation to science and humanity.”
The commission moved into Havana’s Hotel San Carlos during their three-month stay. Chaillé was assigned to work on the prevalence of yellow fever in Cuba. Guitéras, a Cuban-born, American-educated professor of tropical medicine, looked for microorganisms and pathologic changes in the tissue of yellow fever cadavers. And Sternberg searched for a pathogen in the blood samples. Carlos Finlay, Juan Guitéras and George Sternberg would form a lasting friendship during the work—all three would spend the next twenty-five years fighting this disease.
Dr. Sternberg was an expert at photomicroscopy. Using oil immersion objectives and a Tolles amplifier, he produced 105 photographs of blood smears during his months in Cuba. Sternberg, America’s “pioneer bacteriologist,” also had an impressive résumé. He was captured by Confederates during the Battle of Bull Run, escaped and made his way back to Washington. After the Civil War, he served on the western frontier. During service at Fort Barranacas, Florida, Sternberg contracted yellow fever. He survived the fever, but it launched a twenty-year grudge against the disease he searched tirelessly for beneath the microscope. Like Finlay, Sternberg would publish roughly forty articles on the subject of yellow fever; but Sternberg’s expertise was not limited to yellow fever alone. He discovered, the same year as Louis Pasteur, the pathogen responsible for pneumonia, and he was the first in this country to show the malarial parasite and tuberculosis germ. But Sternberg was anxious for his own fame. He was ambitious, and it would take him far. Two decades later, Sternberg and Finlay would again battle yellow fever, one as the most powerful medical mind in America, the other as the most ridiculed scientist in Cuba.
The commission admired and worked well with Finlay, but ultimately were uninterested in his theory about atmospheric conditions, instead focusing on the ever-popular germ theory. They failed to discover any new groundbreaking information on the disease and soon returned to the United States. Finlay’s interest in the disease, however, was roused, and he began extensive studies building on the work of the commission. For his part, Finlay was more interested in the hemorrhaging so common to the disease. He believed the “germ” or agent of infection must be spread through the blood. What could pass blood from one person to another? What independent agent could take the blood of one sick person and spread disease to a second one?
There had been some very recent studies on insects as vectors by Patrick Manson, who would later make the connection between mosquitoes and malaria. There was also a French scientist named Louis-Daniel Beauperthuy who had suggested twenty years before that a mosquito—a striped one—had an intrinsic relationship to yellow fever. The fewer mosquitoes, the fewer incidences of fever. Where Beauperthuy missed the mark was in believing that the mosquito just carried filth or decomposing matter, spreading the disease through its bite. Around the same time as Beauperthuy, an American physician, Josiah C. Nott,