Carlos Finlay

Carlos Juan Finlay was a Cuban epidemiologist, born in Puerto Principe to a Scottish father and a French mother, who trained at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and practiced ophthalmology in Havana. In 1881 he proposed that yellow fever was transmitted not by direct contact but by the mosquito Aedes aegypti acting as a disease vector, an idea that was met with ridicule when he presented it that year but was confirmed nearly two decades later by the United States Army's Walter Reed Commission in 1900. He went on to serve as Cuba's chief health officer from 1902 to 1909, was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine without winning it, and received France's Legion of Honour in 1908.