In the ravaged south of the Civil War a little boy fleeing Richmond made a vow that was to change his destiny and ours. Someday he would be a soldier and win a big battle.

Years later, William Crawford Gorgas became a soldier in the Medical Corps and won a battle against one of the slyest and most treacherous enemies of man—yellow fever.

Gorgas began his fight during the Spanish-American War in the death trap of Havana. There the diseased, dead and dying lay piled together in filthy gutters. Starving natives lived on rats and insects. Water was polluted. As health officer, Gorgas launched the biggest sanitary campaign in history, cleaned and disinfected the city. But yellow fever casualties mounted. Here was a plague as mysterious as it was deadly.

This is the story of a man who accomplished the impossible. In the fever-ridden jungles, swamps and cities of the Canal Zone, Gorgas fought ignorance, superstition and indifference. Engineers anxious for authority tried to hamper and discredit his work. He was denied essential supplies—the only items he could be sure of receiving were coffins. President Theodore Roosevelt, aware of the importance of his work, directed the Commission to cooperate with Dr. Gorgas, who finally succeeded in freeing Colon and Panama of yellow fever and malaria so that American workers could build the mighty canal.

He went to South Africa to improve the mine conditions in Kimberley and Johannesburg. Then in South America he again fought yellowjack. In 1917, Dr. Gorgas was appointed Surgeon General of the Army Medical Corps he organized for World War I. Honored throughout the world, he died of a paralytic stroke in 1920.

Stranger than fiction is this inspiring biography of a genius whose courage and persistence conquered one of man's most dreaded diseases.

From the book