I never knew much about the Panama Canal, but assumed that it was during its construction that Yellow Fever and Malaria were defeated for the first time. Actually YF was defeated by American army doctors in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and M has gone on and on, even in Panama, despite the best efforts, etc. I was also surprised to find, in this really good 1977 read by historian David McCullough (John Adams, etc.), that the French tried and failed to build the canal first, that Americans had favored a Nicaraguan route before T.R. got hold of the effort, and that very little about it was easy.
I knew people who grew up in the Zone, before President Carter turned the canal over to the Panamanians, but their recollections were nothing like the reported experiences of the builders–especially the thousands of black Barbados and Jamaican laborers who were largely denied services available to the whites. It was a different time, 1870 to 1914. Today, there’s an expansion going on that’s expected to be completed in 2010. Thanks to the magic of the Net, you can view the canal live via webcams at the previous link, or take a timelapse trip through the canal yourself, the whole twelve-hour journey in one minute fifty-six seconds.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Saw the Canal when I was in Panama on a business in the middle seventies. Quite a sight. Saw a freighter going through one of the locks. Joe
Watch the video. It’s pretty cool. Better if you know something about the problems of building it. For that you need to read the book. 😉
I’m sure you are also aware that, instrumental in the end of yellow fever was none other than Dr. Mudd – who may or may not have been complicit in some way with Edwin Booth – not one of my ancestors, though some of my ancestors share his surname.
I know about Mudd, of course, having read about Lincoln’s assassination and the aftermath, also of Mudd’s treatment of soldiers with Yellow Fever. But he seems not to have known that the disease was spread only by mosquitoes and was otherwise not infectious at all. When the Army’s Dr. Walter Reed, with help from a Cuban doctor, figured out how a certain species of mosquito spread the disease, to test it, several aides spent uncomfortable weeks in the soiled bedclothes of YF victims who had died to see if it could be spread that way. They found that it couldn’t. Only by the mosquito.
They fight malaria, actually the mosquito carriers, with DDT today in Africa, I hear. Remember that awful DDT? Yep.
DDT got a bad rap by that female hysteric “environmentalist.” Thanks to her and her phony book, thousands have died of malaria.