Gorgas Hall; a dormitory dedicated to Josiah Gorgas and William Crawford Gorgas
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- Memorial Type
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- Location: Institution, City, State
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Memorial Structure
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Named Building
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Gorgas, William Crawford
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Gorgas Hall; a dormitory dedicated to Josiah Gorgas and William Crawford Gorgas
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Gorgas Hall opened in 1902 as a dormitory of the Sewanee Grammar School (later Sewanee Military Academy), the preparatory school that was part of the University of the South. In 1981, with the closing of Sewanee's prep school and its merger with two other local preparatory schools, the dormitory converted to use by women students of the University of the South. Today it houses students regardless of gender.
William Crawford Gorgas (1854-1920), Gorgas’s first-born son, attended the University of the South and graduated in 1875. Unable to secure an appointment to West Point, he trained as a physician in New York City and joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps in 1880. In July 1898, after the U.S. defeat of Spanish forces in the Caribbean, Gorgas was appointed chief sanitary officer for American-occupied Havana, Cuba, where he eventually succeeded in controlling yellow fever outbreaks by exterminating the breeding habitats of mosquitoes. Through his sanitation work in Cuba and later in the Canal Zone, Gorgas emerged as an internationally prominent and influential figure promoting public health as well as America’s imperial expansion into “tropical” regions. In 1909, at which time he was head of the American Medical Association, he titled his presidential address, “The Conquest of the Tropics for the White Race.” The defeat of yellow fever and malaria, he said, now meant “the white man can live in the tropics and enjoy as good health as he would have if living in the temperate zone.” He predicted that, in a matter of centuries, the racial transformation and cultural ascendance of Central and South America and other tropical regions of the globe: “the tropics will be the centers of as powerful and as cultured a white civilization as any that will then exist in temperate zones.” In 1914 Gorgas was promoted to brigadier general and appointed U.S. Army surgeon general.
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A three-story structure clad in native sandstone.
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1902
Position: 818 (90 views)