A Radio Talk by Charles F. Kettering To show you the importance of this full scale attempt to control disease, in 1880 the French organized a company under Ferdinand de Lesseps, to build a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. De Lesseps was the man who had built the Suez Canal and was well fitted to do this job. The French company spent hundreds of millions of dollars but they gave up in 1899, not because their machinery was inadequate for the job or their plans were wrong. The thing that stopped them was malaria and yellow fever. So effective was this stoppage that in 1900 all they had left to show for their great effort was a partly finished canal overgrown with jungle, rusted, vine-covered machinery and Monkey Hill Cemetery, which contained, as one writer says: "acres and acres of little white crosses." Now, most people thought of this canal as being a great construction engineering project and when, in 1904, the United States bought the French concessions for about twenty million dollars, we felt that this was just another job for American ingenuity. A big job, everybody conceded, but nothing unusual for us. |