In 1879 the French government began an ambitious project to dig a forty-mile canal across the Isthmus of Panama, which would allow passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The project was a disaster. Workers lived in squalor and died in droves from yellow fever and malaria in the hot, buggy, rainy climate. The architects of the project deemed it cheaper to replace dead workers than to try to improve their working conditions, and at the time, no one knew that malaria and yellow fever were transmitted by mosquitoes. After eight years, over 22,000 workers were dead, and the French abandoned the project.

In 1887 the painter Paul Gauguin travelled to Panama to work on the canal. His plan was to earn enough money to paint. But after two weeks of forced labor and wretched working conditions, he left.

President Theodore Roosevelt bought the rights to the project in 1903, but by that time, thanks to the work of Ronald Ross and Walter Reed, scientists knew that the mosquito was the vector of both malaria and yellow fever. After vigorous mosquito abatement efforts, the rates of disease fell dramatically and the project was completed.