bite him during three visits, while two other nonimmunes, acting as controls, occupied the other side of the building, free of mosquitoes. Moran, who had been in quarantine for 32 days before being bitten and had had no other chance to catch yellow fever, sickened on Christmas morning. The controls, who spent 14 nights in the room protected by the wire screen, but who had breathed the same air as Moran, remained well. The demonstration was complete that a house is infected with yellow fever only if it contains infected mosquitoes.37[1]
To insure that the particular species of mosquito which possessed this infective potency should be accurately depicted for surer identification, Major Reed asked General Sternberg, on 22 December, to have Dr. J. C. McConnell of the Medical Museum sent to Cuba to "make drawings of the mosquito and larvae from live specimens." Dr. McConnell, who had returned to the Museum as anatomist and who acted, in addition, as a one-man Medical Illustration Service, came down bringing his camera lucida and paper, and by the end of the year was at work on his sketches. 38[2]
Transmission by Mosquitoes Established
As the year ended, Reed had every reason for gratification. The fomites experiment was still underway, as were experiments with the transmission of yellow fever by direct infusion of infected blood from an active case to nonimmune volunteers. These experiments, mostly carried out in January and February 1901, proved that the presumptive "parasite" of yellow fever circulates in the bloodstream and is directly transmissible from man to man without the necessity of an intermediate host. These experiments, however, in no way vitiated the conclusion that the only method of propagating yellow fever in nature is by the bite of a mosquito which has drunk the blood of a yellow fever patient— a conclusion which was to be presented by Reed, on behalf of himself, Carroll, and Agramonte, and with a tribute to Lazear, before the Pan American Medical Congress, meeting in Havana on 6 February 1901.
This, and the other conclusions of the report, backed by the unimpeachable testimony of unassailable research techniques, were to be almost immediately accepted by the medical world and the world at large. To Dr. Finlay, as Reed said, "must be given full credit" for the original idea and for the persistence with which it was maintained in the face of indifference and even ridicule. But to Walter Reed, James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and the lamented Jesse W.
