Carlos J. Finlay

Carlos Juan Finlay was born in Camagüey on December 3, 1833. Graduating in medicine from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Finlay returned to Havana to confront yellow fever, which killed tens of thousands of people across the Caribbean annually.

In 1881, at the International Sanitary Conference in Washington, Finlay presented his radical hypothesis: diseases could be transmitted by an intermediary biological vector, specifically the mosquito Aedes aegypti. Confirmed twenty years later by Walter Reed's Commission, Finlay's discovery eradicated yellow fever from Havana and made construction of the Panama Canal possible.