Photo by Underwood & Underwood
QUARANTINE STATION AT PACIFIC ENTRANCE TO CANAL
The night life of the streets is as a rule placid, however, rather than boisterous, nor is Panama an “all night town”. The rule of the tropics is “early to rise” in any event and as a result those parts of the city which the visitor sees usually quiet down by midnight and presently thereafter the regions about the Cathedral Plaza are as quiet and somnolent as Wall Street after dark. But in a more sequestered section of the town, where the public hospital looks down significantly on the spectacle from one side, and the cemeteries show sinister on the other, revelry goes on apace until the cool dawn arises. There the clatter of pianolas which have felt the climate sorely mingles with the clink of glasses in cantinas that never close, and the laughter of lips to which, in public at least, laughter is a professional necessity. Under the red lights at midnight Panama shows its worst. Men of varied voyages, familiar with the slums of Singapore and the purlieus of Paris declare that this little city of a hybrid civilization outdoes them in all that makes up the fevered life of the underworld. Scarcely a minute’s walk away is the American town, quiet and restful under the tropic moon, its winding streets well guarded by the Zone police, its houses wrapped in vines and fragrant with flowers all dark in the hours of repose. But in the congested tangle of concrete houses between the hospitals and the cemetery madness and mirth reign, brains reel with the fumes of the strange drinks of the tropics, and life is worth a passing pleasure—nothing more. Men of many lands have cursed the Chagres fever and the jungle’s ills, but the pest place of Panama has been subjected to no purging process with all the efforts of the United States to banish evil from the Isthmus.
CHAPTER XIV
THE SANITATION OF THE ZONE
The seal of the Canal Zone shows a galleon under full sail passing between the towering banks of the Culebra Cut, with the motto, “The land divided; the world united”. Sometimes as I trudged about the streets of Colon or Panama, or over the hills and through the jungle in the Zone, I have thought a more significant coat-of-arms might be made up of a garbage can rampant and a gigantic mosquito mordant for verily by the collection and careful covering of filth and the slaughter of the pestilential mosquito all the work done on the Zone has been made possible. As for the motto how would this do—“A clean country and a salubrious strait”?
It is the universal opinion of those familiar with the Canal work that if we had approached the task with the lack of sanitary knowledge from which the French suffered we should have failed as they did. No evil known to man inspires such dread as yellow fever. Leprosy, in the individual, does indeed, although well-informed people know that it is not readily communicated and never becomes epidemic. Cholera did strike the heart of man with cold dread, but more than one generation has passed since cholera was an evil to be reckoned with in civilized countries. Yellow fever is now to be classed with it as an epidemic disease, the spread of which can be absolutely and unerringly controlled.
The demonstrated fact that yellow fever is transmitted only by the bite of a stegomyia mosquito which has already bitten, and been infected by, a human being sick of the fever has become one of the commonplaces of sanitary science. Yet that knowledge dates back comparatively few years, and was not available to mankind at the time the French began their struggle with tropical nature. Over the honor of first discovering the fact of the malignant part played by the mosquito there has been some conflict, but credit is generally given to Dr. Donald Ross, a Scotchman in the Indian Civil Service. His investigations however were greatly extended and practical effect was given them by surgeons in the United States Army engaged in the work of eliminating pestilence from Havana. To Majors Walter Reed, Jesse W. Lazear and James Carroll the chief credit is due for testing, proving and applying the theory in Havana. Lazear bravely gave up his life to the experiment, baring his arm to the bite of a mosquito, and dying afterward of yellow fever in terrible agony.