Google doodle on Tuesday, December 3, 2013 celebrates the Carlos Juan Finlay’s 180th birth anniversary
Carlos Juan Finlay was born in 1833 in Puerto Príncipe, now the Cuban city of Camagüey, and studied at Jefferson medical college in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He finished his studies in Havana and Paris before settling in Cuba to open a medical practice.
In 1879 Finlay appointed by the Cuban government to work with a North American commission studying the causes of yellow fever, after two years Carlos Juan Finlay was sent as the Cuban delegate to the fifth International Sanitary Conference in Washington DC.
At the conference, the physician and scientist urged those present to study yellow fever vectors. Finlay would later theorise that the carrier of yellow fever was the mosquito Culex fasciatus, now known as Aedes aegypti.
In August 1915, Finlay passed away at the age of 81 at his home in Havana, Cuba from a seizure induced stroke