Carlos Finlay's Google doodle on December 3. Photograph: Google
Google's latest doodle celebrates the birthday of Carlos Finlay,
the Cuban physician and scientist who theorised that yellow fever was
spread by mosquitoes.
Of French and Scottish descent, Finlay was born in 1833 in Puerto Príncipe, now the Cuban city of Camagüey, and studied at Jefferson medical college in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He finished his studies in Havana and Paris before settling in Cuba to open a medical practice.
Finlay was appointed by the Cuban government in 1879 to work with a North American commission studying the causes of yellow fever, and two years later was sent as the Cuban delegate to the fifth International Sanitary Conference in Washington DC.
At the conference, he urged the study of yellow fever vectors and later stated that the carrier was the mosquito Culex fasciatus, now known as Aedes aegypti.
When a US army's Yellow Fever Board arrived in Cuba in 1900, he sought to persuade it of his mosquito-vector theory.
Finlay's hypothesis and exhaustive proofs were confirmed by the board's head, the US army doctor Walter Reed, paving the way for the eradication of yellow fever and saving generations of lives throughout South America, the Caribbean, Africa and the southern US.
As General Leonard Wood, a physician and military governor of Cuba, put it: "The confirmation of Dr Finlay's doctrine is the greatest step forward made in medical science since Jenner's discovery of the vaccination."
Finlay died in August 2015 from a stroke caused by severe brain seizures in his home in Havana.
Of French and Scottish descent, Finlay was born in 1833 in Puerto Príncipe, now the Cuban city of Camagüey, and studied at Jefferson medical college in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He finished his studies in Havana and Paris before settling in Cuba to open a medical practice.
Finlay was appointed by the Cuban government in 1879 to work with a North American commission studying the causes of yellow fever, and two years later was sent as the Cuban delegate to the fifth International Sanitary Conference in Washington DC.
At the conference, he urged the study of yellow fever vectors and later stated that the carrier was the mosquito Culex fasciatus, now known as Aedes aegypti.
When a US army's Yellow Fever Board arrived in Cuba in 1900, he sought to persuade it of his mosquito-vector theory.
Finlay's hypothesis and exhaustive proofs were confirmed by the board's head, the US army doctor Walter Reed, paving the way for the eradication of yellow fever and saving generations of lives throughout South America, the Caribbean, Africa and the southern US.
As General Leonard Wood, a physician and military governor of Cuba, put it: "The confirmation of Dr Finlay's doctrine is the greatest step forward made in medical science since Jenner's discovery of the vaccination."
Finlay died in August 2015 from a stroke caused by severe brain seizures in his home in Havana.
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