The Panama Canal, one of the wonders of the modern world, ranks among the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. This program spotlights William Gorgas and John Stevens -- only two of the legions who worked on the project, but who stand out, even a century later, for their extraordinary achievements in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Dr. Gorgas is remembered for his success in controlling malaria and yellow fever in the...

A biography of the doctor and sanitation expert who enabled the Panama Canal to be successfully completed by destroying the rats that carried bubonic plague and the mosquitoes that carried malaria and yellow fever.

"General William Crawford Gorgas (1854-1920) was a renowned pioneer in tropical disease and public health control. A scion of Confederate elites, the contours of Gorgas's his life were directly shaped by yellow fever from birth, but it wasn't until Gorgas, Walter Reed, and other members of the US Army Medical Corps stationed in Cuba explored Carlos Finlay's revolutionary mosquito theory that Gorgas discovered his ultimate foe-the Aedes aegypti and...