MIAMI, United States. — On December 3, 1833, the prominent Cuban scientist and epidemiologist Carlos Juan Finlay Barrés was born in Puerto Príncipe (now the city of Camagüey), whose great contribution to world science was his explanation of the way in which yellow fever was transmitted, a disease that hit humanity hard during the 19th century.
Finlay —who always signed as Carlos J.— had an important professional training, since he graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (USA) in 1855, and between 1859 and 1861 he studied in France.
His distinguished academic career meant that in 1872 Finlay was elected a Member of the Royal Academy of Medical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Havana, and a member of Merit more than two decades later, in 1895.
The prominent Cuban scientist carried out studies showing that the spread of cholera was carried out through the waters of the so-called royal ditchprobably contaminated by the sick in the very sources from which that primitive aqueduct was supplied.
Carlos J. Finlay also studied glanders—an infectious and deadly disease caused by the bacterium Burkholderia mallei that mainly affects horses and mules and is transmissible to man—and described the first case of Filaria in blood observed in America in 1882.
bibliographic notes They realize that in 1902, when the independence of Cuba was proclaimed, Carlos J. Finlay was appointed Chief of Health, and structured the country’s health system on completely new bases.
From this position he had to face the last yellow fever epidemic that occurred in Havana (1905) and that was eliminated in three months.
Between 1905 and 1915, eminent European researchers (including two Nobel Prize winners, Ross and Laverán) officially nominated Finlay for the award.
Although he was never awarded the aforementioned distinction, Carlos J. Finlay did receive many other tributes and recognitions, among them, an honor banquet, organized by US Governor Leonard Wood; the Mary Kingsley Medal, from the Institute of Tropical Medicine, an institution directed by Ronald Ross in Liverpool, England; as well as the Bréant Prize, awarded by the Paris Academy of Sciences.
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