Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/300

296 the Isthmus is inseparably linked with disease and death. For more than three hundred years it was the favorite highway from ocean to ocean and many thousands perished en route from tropical disease.

The Panama railroad is only forty-five miles long, but it took five years to build it, and the cost in human life has never been satisfactorily estimated. Two different times a thousand imported men all died within one year.

One of the most pathetic incidents in all the history of human effort was the failure of the French, and the awful toll of death the French people and the laborers paid for their ignorance of scientific sanitation, which came later and is now universally accepted. Gorgas himself says that the Americans could have done no better than the French without the knowledge of the mosquito as a disease carrier. De Lesseps stood at the very head of his class in his field, and he had the best engineers of his time, and the brainiest supervisors; he had ample money and the latest machinery; but death stood in the path of every effort, defying progress. His annual death rate for the eight years was about 240 per thousand, and, after spending over $260,000,000 he met with complete failure, a failure that glares like a death dragon from the old discarded machinery and seems to breathe forth from the very silence of many thousands of graves. Colon, with a population of ten thousand, has a cemetery with one hundred and sixty-seven thousand graves.

And this is the country from which yellow fever has been banished for more than six years; where the mortality from typhoid fever and dysentery has been reduced to the minimum; where malaria has become mild and controllable; the country where the deaths per thousand among canal employees, instead of De Lesseps's 240, is only seven and one half. It is almost unbelievable, but it is true. Among white American employees the death rate is less than three per thousand. The lowest death rate of any considerable number of people in the world is now found in the Canal Zone.

How this has been done is the interesting question and therein lies the great lesson. After a short-lived error which threatened a repetition of the French disaster the government wisely decided to improve the sanitary conditions first, and not send workmen to the slaughter. The unconquerable Gorgas with a good force of physicians, surgeons, nurses, expert sanitarians, skilled engineers and helpers, with ample supplies of disinfectants, were put in the lead. It was recognized that Colon and Panama City must be made habitable the first thing. The little city of Christobal was started by the side of Colon. Houses were built well off the ground, arranged for good ventilation, provided with scientific plumbing, and carefully screened so that the operatives might be protected from mosquitoes during sleeping hours. Colon and Panama City are in the Zone but do not belong to the United States