The extinction of malaria, however, did not attract anything like the attention that the extinction of yellow fever had aroused. The work of Dr. Ronald Ross and his co-workers with the anopheles mosquito, and of Reed and his associates with the stegomyia, undoubtedly gave the knowledge whereby the practical extinction of malaria and yellow fever was accomplished at Havana, but the accomplishment of this work with regard to yellow fever was the event which attracted the greatest attention. It seems almost providential that we had all the machinery at hand whereby the discoveries of the Reed Board could be immediately tested and demonstrated. Here was a large city of 250,000 inhabitants in which yellow fever had been endemic for one hundred and fifty years. The American Army had been in control of the city for two years, and the Health Department was thoroughly organized and equipped and under the charge of a medical officer of the regular Army. Dr. Reed himself was strongly impressed with the advantage it had been to him to have his discoveries given so thorough and conspicuous a test, and wrote me to that effect many times. There has been a great deal of discussion as to who deserves the credit for this great discovery. Undoubtedly Reed and his Board brought all the threads together and actually made the great discovery, but Finlay, Sternberg, Carter and others, started the spinning of many of these threads. Like all great discoveries everywhere it was gradually led up to by many workers. Nothing is more true than the following quotation from one of Huber’s papers: And let me premise here, that in science at least, great names are landmarks; and the owners of these names have traversed and gleaned in fields where many a devoted laborer had delved and sown, and pathetically sweated blood in his altruistic zeal. In science at least no man works in vain. Full many an one, worthy of an elegy, has given his whole life to establishing a fact, or indeed only an item to a fact; his work unrealized, ridicule and even persecution ofttimes his only compensation, throughout perhaps in the meanest destitution, yet his life and his work have been absolutely essential to the building of a mighty fabric. Martyrs have been many among such—dying from the diseases from which they sought to defend others; knowing, too, full well, what their own fate would be. Nor does it in any wise detract from the gratitude due the great man that he has profited by the labors of others, adding what he can of his own, scrutinizing every detail, every datum, permeating and illuminating with his own genius, cementing the mass with his own deductions. And from Flexner: Remarkable achievements are never unique occurrences in nature. Even the greatest men rest on the shoulders of a multitude of smaller ones who have preceded them; and epochal discoveries emerge out of a period of intellectual restlessness that affects many minds.