Spanish Medicine and the Finlay Theory

• December 10, 2003, at 5pm in the Moll Room

• John L. Tone, PhD
  School of History, Technology, & Society
  Georgia Institute of Technology

People have underestimated the role of disease in the destruction of the Spanish army in Cuba from 1895 to 1898, because they have overstated the military effectiveness of the Cuban insurgency and the total number of Spanish casualties from causes other than disease. But the mortality caused by malaria, typhus, and especially yellow fever among Spanish troops can be measured with reasonable precision, and the numbers are appalling.

The Spanish government was fully apprised of the problem. Yet, an aggressive campaign by the Liberal and Republican press exposing this health crisis spurred no action by the Spanish government. The solution provided by the Cuban physician Carlos Finlay, who had for years argued correctly that a particular mosquito, Aedes aegypti, transmitted yellow fever and even prescribed a program of fumigation, water drainage, and the other measures eventually enacted to great effect by the Americans, found no takers.

So why did the Spanish government fail to protect its troops and follow up on Finlay’s work? The answer is complex. While the failure of the Spanish colonial enterprise has often been chalked up to Spain’s “backwardness,” there was nothing backward about Spanish medicine. Spanish medical experts had become converts to the new field of bacteriology, and they found any work conducted outside of the paradigm established by Pasteur and Koch to be suspect. But this made them no different from their North American or European counterparts. It was precisely the “advanced” nature of Spanish medicine that made Spanish experts unwilling to give Finlay a hearing. Another problem was political: In the United States, “public opinion,” forced a solution to the yellow fever crisis in 1900, but the Spanish government empowered by a sham of electoral democracy felt itself immune from such pressures. Moreover, the infantry branch within the Spanish military had become adept at competing for every peseta of public money, starving not only such government services as education, but – of more immediate consequence -- even the army’s own health service. Against this array of obstacles, Finlay, a “mere” practitioner of ophthalmology, a man with numerous enemies and detractors within his own Royal Academy of Sciences in Havana, and, on top of everything else, a sympathizer with the Cuban rebels, had no chance. His timely recipe for saving the Spanish colony in Cuba went untried by Spain, and the United States reaped all the benefits of his work.

Suggested Reading (in English):

• Aristides Agramonte, The Inside History of a Great Medical Discovery, Havana, 1930.
• Lewis J. Amster, “Carlos J. Finlay: The Mosquito Man,” Hospital Practice 22 (May 15, 1987): 223-246.
• François Delaporte, The History of Yellow Fever: An Essay on the Birth of Tropical Medicine, New York, 1991.
• Carlos E. Finlay, Carlos Finlay and Yellow Fever, New York, 1940.
• John Lawrence Tone, “How The Mosquito (Man) Liberated Cuba,” History and Technology 18, no. 4, (2002): 277-308.
• Margaret Warner, “Hunting the Yellow Fever Germ: The Principle and Practice of Etiological Proof in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” The Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 361-382.

[November 14, 2003]

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