William Crawford Gorgas

William Crawford Gorgas was an American military physician, born in Alabama, who served as the 22nd Surgeon General of the United States Army from 1914 to 1918 and built his career in public health and tropical medicine. As chief sanitary officer in Havana after the Spanish-American War, he applied the mosquito-transmission theory of yellow fever to organize a sanitation campaign that drove the city's yellow fever cases from 784 to zero within a year. He went on to lead the sanitation program during construction of the Panama Canal, draining mosquito breeding grounds, fumigating buildings and installing netting on a mass scale, efforts credited with saving thousands of lives and making the canal's completion possible; he served as president of the American Medical Association in 1909-1910 and received a knighthood from King George V shortly before his death in 1920.