At the dawn of the 20th century, a U.S. Army Yellow Fever Board stationed in Cuba, headed by Major Walter Reed, confirmed a theory of Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay about the role of mosquitoes in ...

By 1881 Finlay had fixed on mosquitoes as the cause, but his theory was largely dismissed. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, during which far more U.S. troops died from yellow fever than ...