1851-1902

American physician, military surgeon, and epidemiologist whose discovery in 1900 that the aedes aegypti mosquito is the vector of yellow fever soon led to the control and conquest of this disease. Yellow fever is a tropical viral hepatitis. For centuries it was among the most feared plagues in the world. Carlos Juan Finlay expressed the mosquito vector theory in 1881, but only after Reed's work could William Crawford Gorgas institute the effective public health policies that eliminated yellow fever from Havana, Cuba, by 1902.