Background
Born in 1854 in Toulminville, Alabama, Gorgas was the first of six children of Josiah Gorgas and Amelia Gayle Gorgas.
Born in 1854 in Toulminville, Alabama, Gorgas was the first of six children of Josiah Gorgas and Amelia Gayle Gorgas.
Young Gorgas's early education was irregular because of the Civil War, but in 1875 he took a bachelor of arts degree from the University of the South. Desiring a military career, Gorgas exhausted every possible means of getting an appointment to West Point, then decided to enter the Army by way of a medical degree.
After graduating from the Bellevue Medical College in New York City and serving an internship at the Bellevue Hospital, he was appointed to the Medical Corps of the U. S. Army in June 1880.
He was assigned to three posts - Fort Clark, Fort Duncan, and Fort Brown - in Texas. In 1898, after the end of the Spanish–American War, he was appointed Chief Sanitary Officer in Havana, working to eradicate yellow fever and malaria. Gorgas capitalized on the momentous work of another Army doctor, Major Walter Reed, who had himself built much of his work on insights of a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, to prove the mosquito transmission of yellow fever.
As chief sanitary officer on the canal project, Gorgas implemented far-reaching sanitary programs including the draining of ponds and swamps, fumigation, mosquito netting, and public water systems. These measures were instrumental in permitting the construction of the Panama Canal, as they significantly prevented illness due to yellow fever and malaria (which had also been shown to be transmitted by mosquitoes in 1898) among the thousands of workers involved in the building project. Gorgas served as president of the American Medical Association in 1909–10. He was made Surgeon General of the Army in 1914. He retired from the Army in 1918.
He was a Georgist and argued for adopting Henry George's popular 'Single Tax'.
In 1883 he married Marie Cook Doughty.