PANAMA MAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 September 1940, Page 9

PANAMA MAN

FEVER-STRICKEN AREA MADE HEALTHY. But for him there might have been no Panama Canal. William Crawford Gorgas was his name, and he was an American surgeon born in 1854. Before he died in 1920 he linked east and west as never before and made it possible for ships to take a short cut from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Brave attempts to make the Panama Canal had failed, the most disastrous of all failures being the one in which De Lesseps was concerned. It was not the mountains which had to be crossed, not the difficulty of keeping control over a vast multitude of workpeople, nor the engineering problems which made for ruin. It was a mosquito. Panama at the end of last century and in the first years of this was a death zone. Malaria was everywhere. Then William Gorgas took a hand. Becoming chief sanitary officer for the area in 1904, he was the means of conquering the scourge which had repeatedly beaten back all who had tried to build a highway from sea to sea. Over 450 miles he had the power of a king, with President Roosevelt behind him. He had the jungle cut down. He cleared the swamps in a million square yards in a single year. He had 30,000,000 square yards of rank grass destroyed. He maintained three million feet of ditches, and emptied 300,000 cans of oil on water in which the mosquito larva bred in uncounted millions. He fumigated 11,000.000 cubic feet of house space. He got rid of all lakes where fever might lurk, and compelled every man and woman to keep every water jar covered. He insisted on the entire army of 50,000 workers being teetotal, and it was these 50,000 sober men who conquered where all others had failed. The dread fever-stricken centre became healthy. The death rate rushed down. The work went on. The engineers succeeded. The Panama Canal was built, and we may say that Ihe work was brought to a triumphant conclusion ’very largely because of William Gorgas who died in London when on his way to Africa, his coffin, draped with the Stars and Stripes, having for a time a place in St Paul’s Cathedral.