The French attempt to build the Panama Canal, led by Ferdinand de Lesseps from 1881 to 1889, was defeated primarily by yellow fever and malaria transmitted by mosquitoes. The project killed an estimated 22,000 workers before the French company went bankrupt and the attempt was abandoned. When the United States took over the project in 1904, the first priority was the eradication of mosquito breeding sites by William Gorgas — a medical campaign that ultimately made the canal possible. The mosquito thus shaped one of the greatest engineering projects in history.

The Panama Canal's connection to mosquito-borne disease was one of the defining stories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it entered literary and journalistic culture as a parable of human ambition humbled by nature. Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), though set in a fictional South American republic, reflects the broader cultural awareness of tropical disease and mosquito-borne mortality that the Panama story exemplified. The canal's story reinforced the mosquito as a symbol of the limits of human technical mastery over the natural world.