The US Army Yellow Fever Commission led by Walter Reed, working in Havana in 1900–1901, demonstrated conclusively that yellow fever was transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, confirming and extending Carlos Finlay's earlier hypothesis. The Commission conducted controversial human experiments using volunteers who were exposed to mosquito bites in controlled conditions. Reed's findings enabled the eradication of yellow fever from Cuba and Havana within a few years and made the building of the Panama Canal possible.

Walter Reed's mosquito experiments entered American cultural consciousness as a story of scientific heroism and human sacrifice, and they generated a body of popular writing, biography, and later drama. Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters (1926), which included a chapter on Reed, brought the story of mosquito-borne disease to a mass popular audience in vivid, narrative prose that influenced science writing as a literary genre. The mosquito's role as yellow fever vector became one of the central stories of American tropical medicine and its literary representation.