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William C. Gorgas

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Doctor

The Resume

    (October 3, 1854-July 3, 1920)
    Born in Mobile, Alabama
    US Army physician
    Rose to rank of Major General
    President of the American Medical Association (1909-10)
    Surgeon General of the US Army (1914-18)
    Known for his efforts at combating malaria and yellow fever in Florida, Cuba, and the Panama Canal Zone
    Actions included draining ponds and swamps that served as mosquito breeding grounds, fumigation, using mosquito netting, and quarantining yellow fever and malaria patients

Why he might be annoying:

    He failed to get into West Point.
    He met his wife, Marie Doughty, when they were both yellow fever patients and both were expected to die. (Not exactly the most romantic of circumstances.)
    He made little headway against yellow fever during his first two years as Chief Sanitary Officer in Havana, until the work of Walter Reed convinced him that mosquitos were responsible for transmission of the disease.

Why he might not be annoying:

    After he began a campaign to destroy mosquito breeding grounds, the number of cases of yellow fever in Havana dropped from 784 to zero in a single year (1900-01).
    His work in Panama saved thousands of lives and made completion of the canal possible.
    He and George Washington Goethals, the Army engineer who supervised construction of the Panama Canal, were jointly the first winners of the Public Welfare Medal awarded by the National Academy of Science (1914).
    During World War I, he established the Medical Service Corps.
    In large part due to the Medical Service Corps, the death rate from diseases in the US Army was a quarter those of European armies.
    He received an honorary knighthood (1920).

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 17 Votes: 5.88% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 14 Votes: 28.57% Annoying