Gorgas, William Crawford 1845-1920

GORGAS, WILLIAM CRAWFORD 1845-1920

Army surgeon and sanitation expert

Army Doctor

William Craw-ford Gorgas was born on 3 October 1845 in Mobile, Alabama. His father, Josiah, served as chief of ordnance for the Confederate army during the Civil War and later as a college president. His mother, Amelia, was a member of a prominent Mobile family. Gorgas received a bachelor's degree from the University of the South in 1875 and four years later finished his M.D. at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York. After a year as an intern at Bellevue, Gorgas entered the military as a first lieutenant at a salary of $1,500 per year. He remained in the U.S. Army Medical Corps until the year before his death.

Yellow Fever

During the next two decades Gorgas rotated through remote military posts in the United States, including forts in Texas, North Dakota, and Florida. Gorgas had his first contact with yellow fever in 1883 while stationed at Fort Brown, Texas, located on the Rio Grande River. Some twenty-three hundred sufferers from the disease were quarantined at the fort, and Gorgas was under orders not to have contact with any of them. Nevertheless, Gorgas undertook an autopsy on a fever victim and was promptly placed under house arrest by the fort commander. The arrest order was soon overturned, and Gorgas was assigned to care for the yellow fever patients. One victim who came under his care was Marie Doughty, the sister-in-law of a fort officer. Marie became so ill that Gorgas had a grave prepared for her. Although she lived, Gorgas contracted the disease, and the pair recovered together. The two were married in the fall of 1884. The immunity to yellow fever that Gorgas developed at Fort Brown would prove useful later in his career.

Assignment to Cuba

Just after the close of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Gorgas was sent to Cuba as chief sanitary officer. American troops in Havana were suffering not only from yellow fever but also typhoid and dysentery. Gorgas, who thought yellow fever developed from filthy conditions, cleaned up the city. Typhoid and dysentery rates declined; but as twenty-five thousand people from Spain entered Cuba, yellow fever rates began to rise.

Cuba and Panama

As the situation in Havana worsened, U.S. Army surgeon general George M. Sternberg appointed Dr. Walter Reed and three others to a commission to study the yellow fever epidemic. Once they demonstrated the relationship between Aedes aegypti mosquito and yellow fever, Gorgas cleaned Havana of larvae breeding grounds. His success in Cuba led to his assignment to the Panama Canal Project, where his work began in March 1904. During the next decade Gorgas implemented the sanitation lessons he learned in Cuba. His efforts reduced the death rate from all diseases among canal workers in Panama below that of any American state or city.

Later Life

By the time the Panama Canal was completed in 1914, Gorgas was sixty-eight years old. Despite his age, President Woodrow Wilson appointed him surgeon-general of the U.S. Army, and Gorgas supervised a medical corps that during World War I grew from 435 to more than 32,000 physicians. Three days after the war ended Gorgas retired and began a private effort with the International Health Board to rid the world of yellow fever. Gorgas died on 3 July 1920 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Source:

John M. Gibson, Physician to the World: The Life of General William C. Gorgas (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989).