He was assigned to three posts—
Fort Clark,
Fort Duncan, and
Fort Brown—in Texas. He was sent to Fort Brown (1882–84) to take control of an epidemic of
yellow fever. One of his patients was Marie Cook Doughty, who nearly died from the disease. In the course of caring for her, he contracted the disease himself. They both recovered together, and during the time of convalescence, fell in love, soon thereafter getting married. Gorgas capitalized on the momentous work of another Army doctor, Major
Walter Reed, who had built much of his work on the insights of Cuban doctor,
Carlos Finlay, to prove the mosquito transmission of
yellow fever. Through his efforts draining both the
Aedes aegypti mosquito vector breeding ponds and quarantining of yellow fever patients in screened service rooms, cases in Havana plunged from 784 to zero within a year. As chief sanitary officer on the canal project, Gorgas implemented far-reaching sanitary programs, including the draining of ponds and swamps, fumigation, use of
mosquito netting, and construction of public water systems. These measures were instrumental in permitting the construction of the
Panama Canal, as they significantly prevented illness due to yellow fever and malaria (which had also been shown to be transmitted by mosquitoes in 1898) among the thousands of workers involved in the building project. Gorgas served as president of the
American Medical Association in 1909–10. He was appointed as
Surgeon General of the Army in 1914. That same year, Gorgas and
George Washington Goethals were awarded the inaugural
Public Welfare Medal from the
National Academy of Sciences. The involvement of
America in World War I led to a need for what were called "reconstruction aides", civilian women who were sent to France to provide occupational therapy services for wounded soldiers, and in order to train these medical personnel, a number of emergency courses, programs, and schools were set up in the United States. In particular, at the request of Gorgas, the
Boston School of Occupational Therapy was founded in 1918 with a goal of providing a supply of trained occupational therapists to U.S. military hospitals. Subsumed into
Tufts University, the school exists to this day. Gorgas retired from the Army in 1918, having reached the mandatory retirement age of 64. ==Personal life==