HOME AND EDUCATION
Follette, Belle Case La
Home and Education Conducted by BELLE CASE LA FOLLETTE The Canal Zone---A Health Resort AS I WRITE I am sitting in the Hotel Washington at Colon looking out upon the Caribbean Sea. Yet the scene...
...Think of it...
...Yet the scene is not at all unlike that common to the Atlantic Coast...
...It required sixteen months to stamp out yellow fever from the Isthmus...
...WE ARE HERE at what is called the beginning of the rainy season (May to December...
...If this one most dreaded, because most disease stricken spot on the map of the world, this tropical jungle can be made healthful and habitable beyond other places, heretofore regarded as earth's most favored spots, what heights may we not hope to attain in racial and individual healthfulness...
...The average temperature is about eighty degrees...
...As Mr...
...The first great hero of the Canal is therefore Colonel William C. Gorgas, recently appointed Surgeon General...
...The architecture is simple and plain...
...The bathrooms are perfect in convenience and sanitary arrangement...
...The opalescent globes and graceful columns are of the same design as those that beautify the streets of Washington...
...This forty-eight miles of road cost 2,500 lives...
...But I rejoice in the occasion...
...except for the pounding of the sea I might have thought I was dreaming...
...She prefers the Pacific...
...An authority states, "Judging by the alarm caused by the comparatively mild epidemic of 1905, there is no doubt that if the American force had had the same amount of yellow fever that the French had, the work of constructing the canal would have been stopped, on account of lack of men...
...Naturally not all who were sick were sent to the hospital...
...sanitary preparations...
...Breeding places were eliminated, such bodies of water as could be economically disposed of were filled...
...No case has appeared since...
...out of 84 deaths, 35 were employees...
...Last night as I saw the sun set (it goes down suddenly here in the Tropics) and watched the soft low hovering clouds lose their many hues, the electric lights went on...
...This same trail was used by thousands of Forty-niners who chose the Isthmus instead of the long overland route to California...
...Planned to suit the place and its purpose, it evidences careful consideration of fundamentals and scrupulous thought as to details...
...Rats had to be eliminated...
...What greater public service than a model hotel...
...In a month they had all died of yellow fever except himself...
...And it is stated that out of a total of eighty thousand or more workmen over fifty thousand were treated for illness...
...The land that connected North and South America, which the canal how divides, lies like a flattened arch in an easterly and westerly direction...
...This is comparatively a very low mortality rate...
...The Superintendent of the railroad brought his three sisters with him...
...Here was a superb project that had always appealed to the imagination of the world...
...This Hotel Washington pleases me greatly...
...They were in such despair that they would sit on the shore and wait for the rising tide to swallow them up...
...For ten years an engineer under Balboa worked on plans for an artificial waters way...
...But "conditions on the Isthmus were radically different from those in Havana...
...The public must be accommodated...
...It is estimated that 22,000 died from malaria and yellow fever...
...Located on the sea the largest possible space is made to face the grateful ocean breezes, to which wide casement windows in all available places give free ingress...
...Of course people became panicky, and lost faith in the mosquito theory and effectiveness of the work of sanitation...
...If yellow fever can be eliminated from the Canal Zone, why should not every fever disappear from the face of the earth...
...I the Atlantic...
...The Tivoli at the Pacific end was also built and is owned by Uncle Sam...
...Bowles says that from the earliest times the Isthmus was looked upon as a most deadly place...
...From this place the cargo was carried on pack animals over paved roads to the city of Panama, which became still another center of infection...
...When we began our one great advantage was not our, superior knowledge of engineering—it was the knowledge that certain mosquitoes car-ried yellow fever and malaria...
...Over five thousand deaths are recorded at one large French hospital...
...the fiscal year the death rate per thousand from accidents was 3.08...
...During the eight years the Americans have been at work over five thousand deaths have been recorded, about one-fifth due to accidents...
...This takes no account of the number of maimed and crippled in the building of the canal...
...THE GREAT impetus to Isthmus traffic that followed the discovery of gold in California suggested the building of the Panama Railroad, which was begun in 1849...
...I am told that even when the rainfall is heaviest, it is seldom continuous...
...others, were oiled, or larvicided...
...It is gratifying to know that lie is admired and loved here on the Zone, not only as a human benefactor, but as a most friendly, approachable, companionable man, modest, simple, generous...
...The lowest recorded temperature since the American occupation is fifty-nine degrees Fahrenheit...
...At times trainloads of dead were taken to the cemetery daily...
...On the little map of our guidebook we find a route outlined across the Isthmus as the "Old Paved Trail between Porto Bello and Panama" where the Spaniards made a road of cobblestones, a part of which it is said, can still be traced...
...The whole house suggests that- the hose could be turned on without injury...
...it must have been deferred years longer, perhaps another generation...
...all dwellings effectively screened, It was a work that required time, even with all the resources of the United States back of it...
...Balboa crossed the strip of land in 1500 and took possession in the name of Spain...
...Irazu...
...Some one objects that the government should not put money into a hotel...
...But it was done hastily, and as an expedient...
...An epidemic of yellow fever broke out early in 1905...
...So that the city of Panama on the Pacific is east of Colon on the Atlantic...
...Here, at Las Cruces another center of infection was formed...
...Yellow fever and malaria were the most dreaded diseases, but plague was also feared...
...Today for the first time in our touring trip, Elizabeth and I have parted company...
...Great masses of clouds blow across from ocean to ocean and there are big downpours of rain, and yet, although the Isthmus is said to be the wettest place in the world, nearly every day has some sunshine...
...It is said that the walls of Panama bear many initials and names of these adventurous men who whittled as they sat vainly looking out to sea, and who sickened and died before ships came for which they so anxiously watched...
...Our guide gave us such individual examples as these: A French engineer who was on the Isthmus when our government began work, said that he came over with a party of seventeen: young Frenchmen...
...Here another center of infection was formed...
...The sanitary department had been established and running for two years in Havana when the work of yellow fever prevention was begun there...
...Without it we might have failed...
...James Ten Broeck Bowles, Physiologist, Isthmian Canal Commission, pointed out in a very interesting article, which appeared in The Survey October 5, 1912, it was mosquitoes, open sewers, stagnant water, and centuries of unacclimated white travelers across the canal that piled up the work for modern sanitary engineers at the Isthmus when the United States undertook the big job of building the Canal...
...Of course every opening is perfectly screened...
...With work of mosquitoes uninhibited they were really centers of infection...
...After four days of hard sight seeing I pled guilty to fatigue and desire for a day off...
...He was the presiding genius of the sanitation work...
...What a conquest ! WHAT an object lesson...
...The Canal Zone was divided into sanitary districts, and the work of extermination was carried that distance outside the circle of every inhabited district...
...On the contrary they have been a relief...
...THIS long death history of the Isthmus loomed up appallingly when the United States Government began work in 1904...
...Within a few years, twenty-one had died, the most of yellow fever...
...The engineering feats were...
...It is related that less than two months after eight hundred Chinamen were imported for work on the road, hardly one of the original number could wield a pick or shovel...
...How anxiously they must have awaited the results...
...For four hundred years the stegomyia (yellow fever) and anopheles (malaria) mosquitoes had been getting in their evil work on the un-acclimatized travelers, neither scientists nor laymen suspecting that these little pests were a million times more dangerous enemies of human kind than the dreaded pirates of the sea...
...I know Elizabeth will come home with wonderful tales of what she has seen but while I may allow I've been a bit lone-some, I shall not admit that anything would compensate for this day of leisure...
...The walls outside and in are of soft gray plaster, with green trimmings...
...The floors are of soft red tile, with rounded corners...
...and all children's diseases which so tax the constitution and take such heavy tribute from the sum of human happiness, why should they not be stamped out also...
...The Canal Commission, anxious to, meet the expectations of those who wanted "to see the dirt fly" thought to start the work of digging simultaneously with the...
...Our guide told us it was foolish to pay much attention to the storms because they were so capricious that it might be raining at one end of a railway station and the sun shining at the other...
...She credited me with greater endurance in climbing Mt...
...but the arches of the porches and balconies give an appropriate Spanish touch...
...Many thoughtful observers say that if the French had possessed this knowledge they might have succeeded...
...It is monotony and humidity rather than excessive heat that makes the climate depressing—if it can be called so...
...After Morgan's raids, the route was changed...
...It must have been a trying time for those who bore the great burden of responsibility of this demonstration upon which the eyes of the world were fixed...
...It is only fair that I should confess she has far outstripped me in energy and zest in this less invigorating climate...
...Gorgas is likewise beloved and her social gifts and democratic spirit made lasting impression upon this unique and important world...
...From its low-lying parts, spirit's, miasma and the like were supposed to arise at nightfall and fill the surrounding air with deadly poison...
...Ships' were unloaded at Porto Bello into small sailing vessels, which went on to the village of Chagres at the mouth of the Chagres River...
...And right here I may just as well remind you, as every one is certain to do who writes about the Canal, that if from your school days you have held the belief that the land at the Isthmus of Panama runs north and south, and that therefore the canal must take an easterly and westerly direction, it will be necessary for you to wipe out this erroneous picture and draw a new map in your mind just reversing this order...
...It was thousands of Negroes from Jamaica and the other West Indies who furnished the labor that made it possible to com-plete the enterprise...
...Like everyone who lives or comes to the Canal Zone, Elizabeth and I have taken sides...
...within a month they had all died of yellow fever...
...The highest temperature in the sun, 105 degrees...
...But it should be remembered that a very large share of the employees who constitute most of the population of the Canal Zone is made up of men without families...
...It was necessary to begin the work at the Isthmus with a thorough sanitary survey next these ancient sources of infection, these old cities and towns must be cleared of the accumulated dirt of four hundred years...
...Most of their work was under the contract system...
...Almost no woodwork is used except for the doors...
...There were 246 cases of which 133 were employees...
...Although it may not sound like a difficult task, it proved to be an enormous undertaking, and required five years for its completion...
...thousands of tons of rubbish must be burned, streets paved, sewage systems built, a clean, uncontaminated, plentiful water supply furnished...
...Next week Mrs...
...This road was but forty-eight miles long...
...The experiment at Havana had demonstrated that they could- be exterminated...
...The Mother Superior of the sisters nursing in Ancon hospital, told him that she had come out with twenty-four sisters...
...Many were shipwrecked on the treacherous Caribbean Sea...
...We women should not rest until this new hope and promise of universal freedom from contagious disease is established as a world standard...
...I was told that Colonel Goethals had ridden over the route on horseback, but one must take some allowance for all the wonderful things related of the Colonel...
...Cuba was made free from yellow fever in seven months...
...La Follette will write more about the Panama Canal for these pages—description and comment gleaned first hand during her recent visit to the Canal Zone.—Editor's Note...
...But thus far the showers which have come rather unexpectedly, and at times quite heavily, have not lasted long enough to cause us the least inconvenience...
...Just as during the Civil War before aught was known of sterilization surgeons grew fearful of their instruments, so these hospitals became dreaded, without knowing the reason...
...from disease 7.08...
...It followed practically the old line of travel...
...The statistics of death and disease which overpowered the French are very imperfect...
...Because Porto Bello was the first stopping place for ships crossing the ocean from Europe, it became the first center of infection...
...Without the application of our modern scientific knowledge, the opening day would not be in 1915...
...The Washington is of a different order...
...But the contractors were charged a dollar a day for care of each sick workman...
...It was not necessary to clear the entire Isthmus of mosquitoes...
...the canal cuts through it in northwesterly and southeasterly course...
...we are beginning to realize, our high mortality statistics are due to the death of infants...
...total from all causes 10.16...
...It was built and is owned by the United States government...
...But I insist it is equally strange to witness the sun set in the Atlantic...
...By New Years, 1906, yellow fever was stamped out...
...tremendous but death and disease were the greatest obstacles...
...But more died from fever on the Isthmus at these centers .of contagion...
...Moreover, there grew up a mysterious dread of the hospitals...
...While I am lazily fanned by Atlantic breezes, she is doing the Island of Taboga twelve miles from the mainland in the Pacific, where Pizarro organized his famous expedition to Peru, the birthplace of Rosa Lima, the only American saint in the calendar—now a restful Panamian resort...
...Goethe prophesied that the United States would ultimately succeed...
...The statistics would make you believe that this neck of land, which in former days was looked upon as a breeding place of fevers, pestilence and death has now become a health resort...
...It was a perilous journey...
...Since then it has been the ambition of nations to cut a way between, the, continents...
...Panama is only nine degrees north of the equator...
...the maximum in the shade 96 degrees...
...From this place the cargo was transshipped to small dugouts and carried up the river forty miles, to a point where the stream changes its course...
...The radius of flight of the jellow fever and malaria mosquitoes is limited to one thousand yards...
...She was wonderfully impressed at seeing the sun rise in the Pacific...
...expensive hospitals were built...
...WHILE it should ever be remembered that the building of the Canal was done at great risk and sacrifice, yet the demonstration of what can be accomplished by modern sanitation is the one greatest contribution made to the world...
...and as...
Vol. 6 • May 1914 • No. 22
