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).

William Crawford Gorgas

William Crawford Gorgas (1854-1920), surgeon general of the U.S. Army, conquered yellow fever in the Panama Canal Zone, thus making the building of the canal possible.

William C. Gorgas was born Oct. 3, 1854, near Mobile, Ala., the son of Josiah Gorgas, later a Confederate general and vice-chancellor of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn. Young Gorgas's early education was irregular because of the Civil War, but in 1875 he took a bachelor of arts degree from the University of the South.

Desiring a military career, Gorgas exhausted every possible means of getting an appointment to West Point, then decided to enter the Army by way of a medical degree. After graduating from the Bellevue Medical College in New York City and serving an internship at the Bellevue Hospital, he was appointed to the Medical Corps of the U.S. Army in June 1880. Then followed tours of duty at various Texas posts, in North Dakota, and nearly 10 years at Ft. Barrancas, Fla., a notorious yellow fever area to which Gorgas was assigned because he had previously had the disease and was therefore immune. In 1883 he married Marie Cook Doughty.

After the occupation of Havana, Cuba, by American troops in 1898, Gorgas took charge of a yellow fever camp at Siboney. Later that year he became chief sanitary officer of Havana. Acting on information furnished by the Yellow Fever Commission of U.S. Army physician Walter Reed that a particular strain of mosquito was the carrier of yellow fever, Gorgas deprived the mosquito of breeding places, quickly destroying the carrier and ridding the city of yellow fever. This work brought him an international reputation.

In 1904, when work commenced on the Panama Canal, Gorgas went to the Canal Zone to take charge of sanitation. Although it was known that yellow fever had been largely responsible for the French failure to build the canal, Gorgas encountered continuing opposition to his antimosquito measures from an economy-minded administration. He persevered, however, and, with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, finally succeeded in making the cities of Panama and Colón models of sanitation.

As a result of his work in the Canal Zone, Gorgas came to be generally regarded as the world's foremost sanitary expert. A number of foreign governments and international commissions sought his aid, and his book Sanitation in Panama (1915) quickly became a classic in the public health field. In 1914 he was appointed surgeon general of the Army, and he served in that capacity until his retirement 4 years later. He died in London on July 3, 1920, and is buried in the Arlington National Cemetery.

Further Reading

Marie D. Gorgas and Burton J. Hendrick, William Crawford Gorgas: His Life and Work (1924), is an intimate biography from material furnished by Gorgas's wife. See also John M. Gibson, Physician to the World: The Life of General William C. Gorgas (1950). □

William Crawford Gorgas 1854–1920, American disease and sanitation expert, surgeon general of the United States, b. Mobile, Ala., grad. Bellevue Hospital Medical College, 1879. He served with the U.S. army medical corps after 1880. Stricken with yellow fever while stationed at Fort Brown, Tex., Gorgas soon recovered and thereafter remained immune to the disease. In 1898 he was sent to Cuba as sanitation director. Applying the findings of Carlos J. Finlay and Walter Reed, Gorgas after a short time permanently rid Havana of yellow fever. He then went (1904) to the Isthmus of Panama, where amid administrative difficulties he succeeded in cleansing the Panama Canal Zone of yellow fever by eliminating the breeding places of mosquitoes and segregating stricken patients. He improved health conditions in the cities of Colón and Panama while insuring the completion of the Panama Canal. These events he discussed in his book, Sanitation in Panama (1915). He later made several trips to clear up disease-infested places throughout the world, and he made notable progress in Guayaquil, Ecuador, a city long scourged with yellow fever. He served (1914–19) as surgeon general of the United States and was attached, after 1916, to the International Health Board.

Gorgas, William Crawford (1854–1920) army surgeon and sanitarian, born near Mobile, Alabama. Gorgas is credited with eliminating mosquito breeding places in Havana, Cuba, thereby effecting a dramatic decline in the incidence of yellow fever and malaria. He subsequently carried out similar disease control policies that made possible the construction of the Panama Canal. In 1914 he was appointed surgeon general of the U.S. Army.

Gorgas became involved in treating yellow fever epidemics because he was immune to the disease, having contracted it early in his army career.