Without taking into account the looks of disbelief that prevailed in the audience, and naturally, without making any special emphasis, Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay y Barrés presented his revolutionary theory of the contagion of yellow fever by means of a biological vector: the mosquito known today as Aedes aegypti.
It was February 18, 1881, and the International Sanitary Conference was then in session in Washington.
One hundred and forty-four years after his brilliant discovery, the Cuban Doctor Finlay’s legacy is still fully valid and no one doubts the effectiveness of anti-vectorial campaigns for the elimination of the dangerous vector.
Although there were attempts to silence his gigantic work or even to snatch from him the paternity of his theory of the mosquito as the transmitter of yellow fever, in 1954, the Twelfth Congress of the History of Medicine held in Rome, ratified that only Carlos Juan Finlay y Barrés deserves the merit of achieving such a monumental discovery.
