Carlos Juan Finlay (1833-1915) and the mosquito theory of yellow fever

On 14 August 1881 a physician in Spanish Havana read a paper to the Academy of Sciences proposing that yellow fever passed from person to person inside a mosquito. The room said nothing — no objection, no agreement — and nineteen years passed before an American army board in occupied Cuba acted on the idea and took the credit. Finlay was right about the vector and incomplete about the mechanism: it needed a second discovery, the extrinsic incubation period, that was not his.