WALTER REED
IN THE INTEREST OF SCIENCE--AND FOR HUMANITY!
I
With yellow fever it was different--there were no brawls about it.
Everybody is agreed that Walter Reed--head of the Yellow Fever
Commission--was a courteous man and a blameless one, that he was a
mild man and a logical: there is not one particle of doubt he had to
risk human lives; animals simply will not catch yellow fever!
Then it is certain that the ex-lumberjack, James Carroll, was
perfectly ready to let go his own life to prove Reed’s point, and he
was not too sentimental about the lives of others when _he_ needed
to prove a point--which might and might not be what you would call a
major point.
All Cubans (who were on the spot and ought to know) are agreed that
those American soldiers who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs
were brave beyond imagining. All Americans who were then in Cuba are
sure that those Spanish immigrants who volunteered for the fate of
guinea-pigs were not brave, but money-loving--for didn’t each one of
them get two hundred dollars?
Of course you might protest that fate hit Jesse Lazear a hard
knock--but it was his own fault: why didn’t he brush that mosquito
off the back of his hand instead of letting her drink her fill? Then,
too, fate has been kind to his memory; the United States Government
named a Battery in Baltimore Harbor in his honor! And that same
government has been more than kind to his wife: the widow Lazear
gets a pension of fifteen hundred dollars a year! You see, there are
no arguments--and that makes it fun to tell this story of yellow
fever. And aside from the pleasure, it has to be told: this history
is absolutely necessary to the book of Microbe Hunters. It vindicates
Pasteur! At last Pasteur, from his handsome tomb in that basement in
Paris, can tell the world: “I told you so!” Because, in 1926, there
is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left in the world to
put on the points of six pins; in a few years there may not be a
single speck of that virus left on earth--it will be as completely
extinct as the dinosaurs--unless there is a catch in the fine
gruesome experiments of Reed and his Spanish immigrants and American
soldiers....
It was a grand coöperative fight, that scotching of the yellow jack.
It was fought by a strange crew, and the fight was begun by a curious
old man, with enviable mutton chop whiskers--his name was Doctor
Carlos Finlay--who made an amazingly right guess, who was a terrible
muddler at experiments, who was considered by all good Cubans and
wise doctors to be a Theorizing Old Fool. What a crazy crank is
Finlay, said everybody.
For everybody knew just how to fight that most panic-striking plague,
yellow fever; everybody had a different idea of just how to combat
it. You should fumigate silks and satins and possessions of folks
before they _left_ yellow fever towns--no! that is not enough: you
should burn them. You should bury, burn, and utterly destroy these
silks and satins and possessions before they _come into_ yellow fever
towns. It was wise not to shake hands with friends whose families
were dying of yellow fever; it was perfectly safe to shake hands
with them. It was best to burn down houses where yellow fever had
lurked--no! it was enough to smoke them out with sulphur. But there
was one thing nearly everybody in North, Central, and South America
had been agreed upon for nearly two hundred years, and that was
this: when folks of a town began to turn yellow and hiccup and vomit
black, by scores, by hundreds, every day--the only thing to do was
to get up and get out of that town. Because the yellow murderer had
a way of crawling through walls and slithering along the ground and
popping around corners--it could even pass through fires!--it could
die and rise from the dead, that yellow murderer; and after everybody
(including the very best physicians) had fought it by doing as many
contrary things as they could think of as frantically as they could
do them--the yellow jack kept on killing, until suddenly it got fed
up with killing. In North America that always came with the frosts in
the fall....
This was the state of scientific knowledge about yellow fever up
to the year 1900. But from between his mutton chop whiskers Carlos
Finlay of Habana howled in a scornful wilderness: “You are all
wrong--yellow fever is caused by a mosquito!”
II
There was a bad state of affairs in San Cristobal de Habana in Cuba
in 1900. The yellow jack had killed thousands more American soldiers
than the bullets of the Spaniards had killed. And it wasn’t like most
diseases, which considerately pounce upon poor dirty people--it had
killed more than one-third of the officers of General Leonard Wood’s
staff, and staff officers--as all soldiers know--are the cleanest
of all officers and the best protected. General Wood had thundered
orders; Habana had been scrubbed; happy dirty Cubans had been made
into unhappy clean Cubans--“No stone had been left unturned”--in
vain! There was more yellow fever in Habana than there had been in
twenty years!
Cablegrams from Habana to Washington and on June 25th of 1900 Major
Walter Reed came to Quemados in Cuba with orders to “give special
attention to questions relating to the cause and prevention of yellow
fever.” It was a big order. Considering who the man Walter Reed was,
it was altogether too big an order. Pasteur had tried it! Of course,
in certain ways--though you would say they had nothing to do with
hunting microbes--Walter Reed had qualifications. He was the best of
soldiers; fourteen years and more he had served on the western plains
and mountains; he had been a brave angel flying through blizzards to
the bedsides of sick settlers--he had shunned the dangers of beer
and bottle-pool in the officers’ mess and resisted the seductions
of alcoholic nights at draw poker. He had a strong moral nature.
He was gentle. But it will take a genius to dig out this microbe
of the yellow jack, you say--and are geniuses gentle? Just the
same, you will see that this job needed particularly a strong moral
nature, and then, besides, since 1891 Walter Reed _had_ been doing
a bit of microbe hunting. He had done some odd jobs of searching at
the very best medical school under the most eminent professor of
microbe hunting in America--and that professor had known Robert Koch,
intimately.
So Walter Reed came to Quemados, and as he went into the yellow fever
hospital there, more than enough young American soldiers passed
him, going out, on their backs, feet first.... There were going to
be plenty of cases to work on all right--fatal cases! Dr. James
Carroll was with Walter Reed, and he was not what you would call
gentle, but you will see in a moment what a soldier-searcher James
Carroll was. And Reed found Jesse Lazear waiting for him--Lazear was
a European-trained microbe hunter, aged thirty-four, with a wife and
two babies in the States, and with doom in his eyes. Finally there
was Aristides Agramonte (who was a Cuban)--it was to be his job to
cut up the dead bodies, and very well he did that job, though he
never became famous because he had had yellow fever already and so
ran no risks. These four were the Yellow Fever Commission.
The first thing the Commission did was to fail to find any microbe
whatever in the first eighteen cases of yellow fever that they probed
into. There were many severe cases in those eighteen; there were
four of those eighteen cases who died; there was not one of those
eighteen cases that they didn’t claw through from stem to gudgeon,
so to speak, drawing blood, making cultures, cutting up the dead
ones, making endless careful cultures--and not one bacillus did they
find. All the time--it was July and the very worst time for yellow
fever--the soldiers were coming out of the hospital of Las Animas
feet first. The Commission failed absolutely to find any cause, but
that failure put them on the right track. That is one of the humors
of microbe hunting--the way men make their finds! Theobald Smith
found out about those ticks because he had faith in certain farmers;
Ronald Ross found out the doings of those gray mosquitoes because
Patrick Manson told him to; Grassi discovered the zanzarone carrying
malaria because he was patriotic. And now Walter Reed had failed in
the very first part--and anybody would say it was the most important
part--of his work. What to do? There was nothing to do. And so Reed
had time to hear the voice of that Theorizing Old Fool, Dr. Carlos
Finlay, of Habana, shouting: “Yellow fever is caused by _a mosquito_!”
The Commission went to call on Dr. Finlay, and that old
gentleman--everybody had laughed at him, nobody had listened to
him--was very glad to explain his fool theory to the Commission.
He told them the ingenious but vague reasons why he thought it was
mosquitoes carried yellow fever; he showed them records of those
awful experiments, which would convince nobody; he gave them some
little black eggs shaped like cigars and said: “Those are the eggs
of the criminal!” And Walter Reed took those eggs, and gave them
to Lazear, who had been in Italy and knew a thing or two about
mosquitoes, and Lazear put the eggs into a warm place to hatch into
wigglers, which presently wiggled themselves into extremely pretty
mosquitoes, with silver markings on their backs--markings that looked
like a lyre. Now Walter Reed had failed, but you have to give him
credit for being a sharp-eyed man with plenty of common sense--and
then too, as you will see, he was extraordinarily lucky. While he was
failing to find bacilli, even in the dreadful cases, with bloodshot
eyes and chests yellow as gold, with hiccoughs and with those
prophetic retchings--while he was failing, Walter Reed noticed that
the nurses who handled those cases, were soiled by those cases, never
got yellow fever! They were non-immunes too, those nurses, but they
didn’t get yellow fever.
“If this disease were caused by bacillus, like cholera, or plague,
some of those nurses certainly should get it,” argued Walter Reed to
his Commission.
Then all kinds of strange tricks of yellow fever struck Walter Reed.
He watched cases of the disease pop up most weirdly in Quemados. A
man in a house in 102 Real Street came down with it; then it jumped
around the corner to 20 General Lee Street, and from there it hopped
across the road--and not one of these families had anything to do
with each other, hadn’t seen each other, even!
“That smells like something carrying the disease through the air
to those houses,” said Reed. There were various other exceedingly
strange things about yellow fever--they had been discovered by an
American, Carter. A man came down with yellow fever in a house. For
two or three weeks nothing more happened--the man might die, he might
have got better and gone away, but at the end of that two weeks,
bang! a bunch of other cases broke out in that house. “That two
weeks makes it look as if the virus were taking time to grow in some
insect,” said Reed, to his Commission who thought it was silly, but
they were soldiers.
“So we will try Finlay’s notion about mosquitoes,” said Walter Reed,
for all of the just mentioned reasons, but particularly because there
was nothing else for the Commission to do.
That was easy to say, but how to go on with it? Everybody knew
perfectly well that you cannot give yellow fever to any animal--not
even to a monkey or an ape. To make any kind of experiment to prove
mosquitoes carry yellow fever you _must_ have experimental animals,
and that meant nothing more nor less than human animals. But give
human beings yellow fever! In some epidemics--there were records of
them!--eighty-five men out of a hundred died of it, in some fifty
out of every hundred--almost never less than twenty out of every
hundred. It would be murder! But that is where the strong moral
nature of Walter Reed came to help him. Here was a blameless man, a
Christian man, and a man--though he was mild--who was mad to help his
fellow men. And if you could _prove_ that yellow fever was _only_
carried by mosquitoes....
So, on one hot night after a day among dying men at Pinar del Rio, he
faced his Commission: “If the members of the Commission take the risk
first--if they let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes that have fed
on yellow fever cases, that will set an example to American soldiers,
and then--” Reed looked at Lazear, and then at James Carroll.
“I am ready to take a bite,” said Jesse Lazear, who had a wife and
two small children.
“You can count on me, sir,” said James Carroll, whose total
assets were his searcher’s brain, and his miserable pay as an
assistant-surgeon in the army. (His liabilities were a wife and five
children.)
III
Then Walter Reed (he had been called home to Washington to make a
report on work done in the Spanish War) gave elaborate instructions
to Carroll and Lazear and Agramonte. They were secret instructions,
and savage instructions, when you consider the mild man he was.
It was an immoral business--it was a breach of discipline in its
way, for Walter Reed then had no permission from the high military
authorities to start it. So Reed left for Washington, and Lazear and
Carroll set off on the wildest, most daring journey any two microbe
hunters had ever taken. Lazear? You could not see the doom in his
eyes--the gleam of the searcher outshone it. Carroll? That was a
soldier who cared no damn for death or courts-martial--Carroll was a
microbe hunter of the great line....
Lazear went down between the rows of beds on which lay men, doomed
men with faces yellow as the leaves of autumn, delirious men
with bloodshot eyes. He bit those men with his silver-striped
she-mosquitoes; carefully he carried these blood-filled beasts back
to their glass homes, in which were little saucers of water and
little lumps of sugar. Here the she-mosquitoes digested their meal of
yellow fever blood, and buzzed a little, and waited for the test.
“We should remember malaria,” Reed had told Lazear and Carroll. “In
that disease it takes two or three weeks for the mosquito to become
dangerous--maybe it’s the same here.”
But look at the bold face of Jesse Lazear, and tell me if that was a
patient man! Not he. Somehow he collected seven volunteers, who so
far as I can find have remained nameless, since the test was done
in dark secrecy. To these seven men--whom for all I know he may
have shanghaied--but first of all to himself, Lazear applied those
mosquitoes who a few days before had fed on men who now were dead....
But alas, they all stayed fit as fiddles, and that discouraged Lazear.
But there was James Carroll. For years he had been the right-hand man
of Walter Reed. He had come into the army as a buck private and had
been a corporal and a sergeant for years--obeying orders was burned
into his very bones--and Major Reed had said: “Try mosquitoes!” What
is more, what Major Reed thought was right, James Carroll thought
was right, too, and Major Reed thought there was something in the
notion of that Old Theorizing Fool. But in the army, thoughts are
secondary--Major Reed had left them saying: “Try mosquitoes!”
So James Carroll reminded the discouraged Lazear: “I am ready!”
He told Lazear to bring out the most dangerous mosquito in his
collection--not one that had bitten only a single case, but he
must use a mosquito that had bitten many cases--and they must be
bad cases--of yellow fever. That mosquito must be as dangerous as
possible! On the twenty-seventh of August, Jesse Lazear picked out
what he thought to be his champion mosquito, and this creature, which
had fed on four cases of yellow fever, two of them severe ones,
settled down on the arm of James Carroll.
That soldier watched her while she felt around with her stinger....
What did he think as he watched her swell into a bright balloon with
his blood? Nobody knows. But he could think, what everybody knows: “I
am forty-six years old, and in yellow fever the older the fewer--get
better.” He was forty-six years old. He had a wife and five children,
but that evening James Carroll wrote to Walter Reed:
“If there is anything in the mosquito theory, I should get a good
dose of yellow fever!” He did.
Two days later he felt tired and didn’t want to visit patients in
the yellow fever ward. Two days after that he was really sick: “I
must have malaria!” he cried, and went to the laboratory under his
own power, to squint at his own blood under the microscope. But no
malaria. That night his eyes were bloodshot, his face a dusky red.
The next morning Lazear packed Carroll off to the yellow fever wards,
and there he lay, near to death for days and days.... There was one
minute when he thought his heart had stopped ... and that, as you
will see, was a bad minute for Assistant-Surgeon Carroll.
He always said those were the proudest days of his life. “I was the
first case to come down with yellow fever after the experimental bite
of a mosquito!” said Carroll.
Then there was that American private soldier they called
“X.Y.”--these outlaw searchers called him “X.Y.,” though he was
really William Dean, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. While James Carroll
was having his first headaches, they bit this X.Y. with four
mosquitoes--the one that nearly killed Carroll, and then three other
silver-striped beauties besides, who had fed on six men that were
fairly sick, and four men that were very sick with yellow fever and
two men that died.
Now everything was fine with the experiments of Quemados. Eight men
had been bitten, it is true, and were fit as fiddles--but the last
two, James Carroll and X.Y., they were real experimental guinea-pigs,
those two, they had both got yellow fever--and James Carroll’s
heart had nearly stopped, but now they were both getting better, and
Carroll was on the heights, writing to Walter Reed, waiting proudly
for his chief to come back--to show him the records. Only Jesse
Lazear was a little cynical about these two cases, because Lazear
was a fine experimenter, a tight one, a man who had to have every
condition just so, like a real searcher--and, thought Lazear, “It
is too bad seeing the nerve of Carroll and X.Y.--but both of them
exposed themselves in dangerous zones once or twice, before they came
down. It wasn’t an absolutely perfect experiment--it isn’t sure that
_my_ mosquitoes gave them yellow fever!” So Lazear was skeptical,
but orders were orders, and every afternoon he went to those rows
of beds at Las Animas, in the room with the faint strange smell,
and here he turned his test-tubes upside-down on the arms of boys
with bloodshot eyes, and let his she-mosquitoes suck their fill. But
September 13th was a bad day, it was an unlucky day for Jesse Lazear,
for while he was at this silly job of feeding his mosquitoes, a stray
mosquito settled down on the back of his hand. “Oh! that’s nothing!”
he thought. “That wouldn’t be the right kind of mosquito anyway!” he
muttered, and he let the mosquito drink her fill--though, mind you,
she was a stray beast that lived in this ward where men were dying!
That was September 13th.
“On the evening of September 18th ... Dr. Lazear complained of
feeling out of sorts, and had a chill at 8 P.M.,” says a hospital
record of Las Animas....
“September 19: Twelve o’clock noon,” goes on that laconic record,
“temperature 102.4 degrees, pulse 112. Eyes injected, face suffused.
[That means bloodshot and red] ... 6 P.M. temperature 103.8 degrees,
pulse, 106. Jaundice appeared on the third day. The subsequent
history of this case was one of progressive and fatal yellow fever”
[and the record softens a little], “the death of our lamented
colleague having occurred on the evening of September 25, 1900.”
IV
Then Reed came back to Cuba, and Carroll met him with enthusiasm,
and Walter Reed was sad for Lazear, but very happy about those two
successful cases of Carroll and X.Y.--and then, and then (brushing
aside tears for Lazear) even in that there was the Hand of God, there
was something for Science: “As Dr. Lazear was bitten by a mosquito
while present in the wards of a yellow fever hospital,” wrote Walter
Reed, “one must, at least, admit the possibility of this insect’s
contamination by a previous bite of a yellow fever patient. This case
of accidental infection therefore _cannot fail to be of interest_....”
“Now it is my turn to take the bite!” said Walter Reed, but he was
fifty years old, and they persuaded him not to. “But we _must_ prove
it!” he insisted, so gently, that, hearing his musical voice and
looking at his chin that did not stick out like the chin of a he-man,
you might think Walter Reed was wavering (after all, here was one man
dead out of three).
“But we must prove it,” said that soft voice, and Reed went to
General Leonard Wood, and told him the exciting events that had
happened. Who could be less of a mollycoddle than this Wood? And he
gave Walter Reed permission to go as far as he liked. He gave him
money to build a camp of seven tents and two little houses--to say
nothing of a flagpole--but what was best of all Wood gave him money
to buy men, who would get handsomely paid for taking a sure one
chance out of five of never having a chance to spend that money! So
Walter Reed said: “Thank you, General,” and one mile from Quemados
they pitched seven tents and raised a flagpole, and flew an American
flag and called that place Camp Lazear (three cheers for Lazear!),
and you will see what glorious things occurred there.
Now, nothing is more sure than this: that every man of the great line
of microbe hunters is different from every other man of them, but
every man Jack of them has one thing in common: they are original.
They were all original, excepting Walter Reed--whom you cannot say
would be shot for his originality, seeing that this business of
mosquitoes and various bugs and ticks carrying diseases was very much
in the air in those last ten years of the nineteenth century. It was
natural for a man to think of that! But he was by all odds the most
moral of the great line of microbe hunters--aside from being a very
thorough clean-cut experimenter--and now that Walter Reed’s moral
nature told him: “You must kill men to save them!” he set out to plan
a series of air-tight tests--never was there a good man who thought
of more hellish and dastardly tests!
And he was exact. Every man about to be bit by a mosquito must
stay locked up for days and days and weeks, in that sunbaked Camp
Lazear--to keep him away from all danger of accidental contact with
yellow fever. There would be no catch in these experiments! And then
Walter Reed let it be known, to the American soldiers in Cuba, that
there was another war on, a war for the saving of men--were there
men who would volunteer? Before the ink was dry on the announcements
Private Kissenger of Ohio stepped into his office, and with him came
John J. Moran, who wasn’t even a soldier--he was a civilian clerk in
the office of General Fitzhugh Lee. “You can try it on us, sir!” they
told him.
Walter Reed was a thoroughly conscientious man. “But, men, do you
realize the danger?” And he told them of the headaches and the
hiccups and the black vomit--and he told them of fearful epidemics in
which not a man had lived to carry news or tell the horrors....
“We know,” said Private Kissenger and John J. Moran of Ohio, “we
volunteer solely for the cause of humanity and in the interest of
science.”
Then Walter Reed told them of the generosity of General Wood. A
handsome sum of money they would get--two hundred, maybe three
hundred dollars, if the silver-striped she-mosquitoes did things to
them that would give them one chance out of five not to spend that
money.
“The one condition on which we volunteer, sir,” said Private
Kissenger and civilian clerk John J. Moran of Ohio, “is that we get
no compensation for it.”
To the tip of his cap went the hand of Walter Reed (who was a
major): “Gentlemen, I salute you!” And that day Kissenger and John
J. Moran went into the preparatory quarantine, that would make them
first-class, unquestionable guinea-pigs, above suspicion and beyond
reproach. On the 5th of December Kissenger furnished nice full meals
for five mosquitoes--two of them had bitten fatal cases fifteen days
and nineteen days before. Presto! Five days later he had the devil of
a backache, two days more and he was turning yellow--it was a perfect
case, and in his quarters Walter Reed thanked God, for Kissenger got
better! Then great days came to Reed and Carroll and Agramonte--for,
if they weren’t exactly overrun with young Americans who were ready
to throw away their lives in the interest of science--and for
humanity--still there were ignorant people, just come to Cuba from
Spain, who could very well use two hundred dollars. There were five
of these mercenary fellows--whom I shall simply have to call “Spanish
immigrants,” or I could call them Man 1, 2, 3, and 4--just as microbe
hunters often mark animals: “Rabbit 1, 2, 3, and 4--” anyway they
were bitten, carefully, by mosquitoes who, when you take averages,
were much more dangerous than machine gun bullets. They earned their
two hundred dollars--for four out of five of them had nice typical
(doctors would look scientific and call them beautiful) cases of
yellow fever! It was a triumph! It was sure! Not one of these men
had been anywhere near yellow fever--like so many mice they had
been kept in their screened tents at Quemados. If they hadn’t been
ignorant immigrants--hardly more intelligent than animals, you might
say--they might have been bored, because nothing had happened to them
excepting--the stabs of silver-striped she-mosquitoes....
“Rejoice with me, sweetheart,” Walter Reed wrote to his wife, “as,
aside from the antitoxin of diphtheria and Koch’s discovery of the
tubercle bacillus, it will be regarded as the most important piece of
work, scientifically, during the nineteenth century....”
Walter Reed was so thorough that you can call him original, as
original as any of the microbe hunters of the great line--for he was
certainly original in his thoroughness. He might have called it a
day--you would swear he was tempted to call it a day: eight men had
got yellow fever from mosquito bites, and only one--what amazing
luck!--had died.
“But can yellow fever be carried in any other way?” asked Reed.
Everybody believed that clothing and bedding and possessions of
yellow fever victims were deadly--millions of dollars worth of
clothing and bedding had been destroyed; the Surgeon-General believed
it; every eminent physician in America, North, South and Central
(excepting that old fool Finlay) believed it. “But can it?” asked
Reed, and while he was being so joyfully successful with Kissenger
and Spaniards 1, 2, 3, and 4, carpenters came, and built two ugly
little houses in Camp Lazear. House No. 1 was the nastier of these
two little houses. It was fourteen feet by twenty, it had two doors
cleverly arranged one back of the other so no mosquitoes could get
into it, it had two windows looking south--they were on the same side
as the door, so no draft could blow through that little house. Then
it was furnished with a nice stove, to keep the temperature well
above ninety, and there were tubs of water in the house--to keep the
air as chokey as the hold of a ship in the tropics. So you see it
was an uninhabitable little house--under the best of conditions--but
now, on the thirtieth of November in 1900, sweating soldiers carried
several tightly nailed suspicious-looking boxes, that came from the
yellow fever wards of Las Animas--to make this house altogether
cursed....
That night, of the thirtieth of November, Walter Reed and James
Carroll were the witnesses of a miracle of bravery, for into this
House No. 1 walked a young American doctor named Cooke, and two
American soldiers, whose names--where are their monuments?--were Folk
and Jernegan.
Those three men opened the tightly nailed, suspicious-looking boxes.
They opened those boxes inside that house, in air already too sticky
for proper breathing.
Phew! There were cursings, there were holdings of noses.
But they went on opening those boxes, and out of them Cooke and Folk
and Jernegan took pillows, soiled with the black vomit of men dead of
yellow fever; out of them they took sheets and blankets, dirty with
the discharges of dying men past helping themselves. They beat those
pillows and shook those sheets and blankets--“you must see the yellow
fever poison is well spread around that room!” Walter Reed had told
them. Then Cooke and Folk and Jernegan made up their little army cots
with those pillows and blankets and sheets. They undressed. They lay
down on those filthy beds. They tried to sleep--in that room fouler
than the dankest of medieval dungeons.... And Walter Reed and James
Carroll guarded that little house, so tenderly, to see no mosquito
got into it, and Folk and Cooke and Jernegan had the very best of
food, you may be sure....
Night after night those three lay in that house, wondering perhaps
about the welfare of the souls of their predecessors in those sheets
and blankets. They lay there, wondering whether anything else besides
mosquitoes (though mosquitoes hadn’t even been proved to carry it
then!) carried yellow fever.... Then Walter Reed, who was a moral man
and a thorough man, and James Carroll, who was a grim man, came to
make their test a little more thorough. More boxes came to them from
Las Animas--and when Cooke and Jernegan and Folk unpacked them, they
had to rush out of their little house, it was so dreadful.
But they went back in, and they went to sleep....
For twenty nights--where are their monuments?--these three men stayed
there, and then they were quarantined in a nice airy tent, to wait
for their attack of yellow fever. But they gained weight. They
felt fit as fiddles. They made vast jokes about their dirty house
and their perilous sheets and blankets. They were happy as so many
schoolboys when they heard Kissenger and those Spaniards (1, 2, 3,
and 4) had really got the yellow jack after the mosquito bites. What
a marvelous proof, you will say, but what a dastardly experiment--but
for the insanely scientific Walter Reed that most dastardly
experiment was not marvelous enough! Three more American boys went
in there, and for twenty nights slept in new unspeakable sheets and
blankets--with this little refinement of the experiment: they slept
in the very pajamas in which yellow fever victims had died. And then
for twenty more nights three other American lads went into House No.
1, and slept that way--with this additional little refinement of the
experiment: they slept on pillows covered with towels soaked with the
blood of men whom the yellow jack had killed.
But they all stayed fit as fiddles! Not a soul of these nine men
had so much as a touch of yellow fever! How wonderful is science,
thought Walter Reed. “So,” he wrote, “the bubble of the belief that
clothing can transmit yellow fever was pricked by the first touch of
human experimentation.” Walter Reed was right. It is true, science is
wonderful. But science is cruel, microbe hunting can be heartless,
and that relentless devil that was the experimenter in Walter Reed
kept asking: “But is your experiment really sound?” None of those
men who slept in House No. 1 got yellow fever, that is true--but
how do you know they were _susceptible_ to yellow fever? Maybe they
were naturally immune! Then Reed and Carroll, who had already asked
as much of Folk and Jernegan as any captain has ever asked of any
soldier--so it was that Reed and Carroll now shot virulent yellow
fever blood under the skin of Jernegan, so it was they bit Folk with
mosquitoes who had fed on fatal cases of yellow fever. They both came
down with wracking pains and flushed faces and bloodshot eyes. They
both came through their Valley of the Shadow. “Thank God,” murmured
Reed--but especially Walter Reed thanked God he had proved those two
boys were not immune during those twenty hot stinking nights in House
No. 1.
For these deeds Warren Gladsden Jernegan and Levi E. Folk were
generously rewarded with a purse of three hundred dollars--which in
those days was a lot of money.
V
While these tests were going on John J. Moran, that civilian clerk
from Ohio, whom Walter Reed had paid the honor of a salute, was a
very disappointed man. He had absolutely refused to be paid; he
had volunteered in “the interest of science and for the cause of
humanity,” he had been bitten by those silver-striped Stegomyia
mosquitoes (the bug experts just then thought this was the proper
name for that mosquito)--he had been stabbed several times by several
choice poisonous ones, but he hadn’t come down with yellow fever,
alas, he stayed fit as a fiddle. What to do with John J. Moran?
“I have it!” said Walter Reed. “This to do with John J. Moran!”
So there was built, close by that detestable little House No. 1,
another little house, called House No. 2. That was a comfortable
house! It had windows on the side opposite to its door, so that
a fine trade wind played through it. It was cool. It had a nice
clean cot in it, with steam-disinfected bedding. It would have
been an excellent house for a consumptive to get better in. It was
a thoroughly sanitary little house. Half way across the inside of
it was a screen, from top to bottom, a fine-meshed screen that the
tiniest mosquito found it impossible to fly through. At 12 o’clock
noon on the twenty-first of December in 1900, this John J. Moran (who
was a hog for these tests) “clad only in a nightshirt and fresh from
a bath” walked into this healthy little house. Five minutes before
Reed and Carroll had opened a glass jar in that room, and out of that
jar flew fifteen she-mosquitoes, thirsty for blood, whining for a
meal of blood, and each and every one of those fifteen mosquitoes,
had fed, on various days before--on the blood of yellow-faced boys in
the hospital of Las Animas.
Clad only in a nightshirt and fresh from a bath, Moran--who knows of
him now?--walked into the healthy little room and lay down on his
clean cot. In a minute that damned buzzing started round his head, in
two minutes he was bitten, in the thirty minutes he lay there he was
stabbed seven times--without even the satisfaction of smashing those
mosquitoes. You remember Mr. Sola, whom Grassi tortured--he probably
had his worried moments--but all Mr. Sola had to look forward to was
a little attack of malaria and a good dose of curative quinine to get
him out of it. But Moran? But John J. Moran was a hog for such tests!
He was back there at four-thirty the same afternoon, to be bitten
again, and once more the next day--to satisfy the rest of the hungry
she-mosquitoes who hadn’t found him the first day. In the other
room of this house, with only a fine-meshed but perfect wire screen
between them and Moran--and the mosquitoes--lay two other boys, and
those two boys slept in that house safely for eighteen nights.
But Moran?
On Christmas morning of 1900, there was a fine present waiting for
him--in his head, how that thumped--in his eyes, how red they were
and how the light hurt them--in his bones, how tired they were! A
nasty knock those mosquitoes had hit him and he came within a hair of
dying but (thank God! murmured Walter Reed) he was saved, this Moran,
to live the rest of his life in an obscurity he didn’t deserve. So
Moran had his wish--in the interest of science, and for humanity!
So he, with Folk and Jernegan and Cooke and all those others proved
that the dirty pest-hole of a house (with no mosquitoes) was safe;
and that the clean house (but with mosquitoes) was dangerous, so
dangerous! So at last Walter Reed had every answer to his diabolical
questions, and he wrote, in that old-fashioned prose of his: “The
essential factor in the infection of a building with yellow fever is
the presence therein of mosquitoes that have bitten cases of yellow
fever.”
It was so simple. It was true. That was all. That was that. And
Walter Reed wrote to his wife:
“The prayer that has been mine for twenty years, that I might be
permitted in some way or at some time to do something to alleviate
human suffering has been granted! A thousand Happy New Years....
Hark, there go the twenty-four buglers in concert, all sounding taps
for the old year!”
They were sounding taps, were those buglers, for the searcher that
was Jesse Lazear, and for the scourge of yellow fever that could
now be wiped from the earth. They were blowing their bugles, those
musicians, to celebrate--as you will see--the fate that waited for
that little commission after a too short hour of triumph....
VI
Then the world came to Habana, and there was acclaim for Walter Reed,
and the customary solemn discussions and doubts and arguments of
the learned men who came. William Crawford Gorgas (who was another
blameless man!) grooming himself for the immortality of Panama, went
into the gutters and cesspools and cisterns of Habana, making horrid
war on the Stegomyia mosquitoes, and in ninety days, Habana had not
a single case of yellow jack--she was free for the first time in two
hundred years. It was magical! But still there came learned doctors,
and solemn bearded physicians, from Europe and America, asking this,
questioning that--and one morning fifteen of these skeptics were in
the mosquito room of the laboratory--oh! they were from Missouri!
“These are remarkable experiments, but the results should be weighed
and considered with reserve ... et cetera!” Then the gauze lid came
off a jar of she-mosquitoes (of course it was by accident) and into
the room, with wicked lustful eyes on those learned scientists the
Stegomyia buzzed. Alas for skepticism! Away went all doubts! From
the room rushed the eminent servants of knowledge! Down went the
screen door with a crash--such was the vehemence of their conviction
that Walter Reed was right. (Though it happened that this particular
jar of mosquitoes was not contaminated.)
Then William Crawford Gorgas and John Guitéras--he was a great
Cuban authority on yellow jack--they were convinced too by those
experiments at Camp Lazear, and they were full of excellent plans
to put those experiments in practice--fine plans, but rash plans,
alas. “It is remarkable,” said Gorgas and Guitéras, “that these
experimental cases at Camp Lazear didn’t die--they had typical yellow
fever, but they got better, maybe because Reed put them to bed so
quickly.” Then they proceeded to play with fire. “We will give newly
arrived non-immune immigrants yellow fever--a smart attack of it, but
a _safe_ attack of it.” They planned this, when it really was so easy
to wipe out yellow fever simply by warring on the Stegomyia, which
does not breed in secret places, which is a very domestic mosquito!
“And at the same time we can confirm Reed’s results,” thought Gorgas
and Guitéras.
The immigrants (of course they were very ignorant people) came; the
immigrants listened and were told it was safe; seven immigrants and a
bold young American nurse were bitten by the poisoned Stegomyia. And
of these eight, two immigrants and the bold young American nurse went
out from the hospital, safe from another attack of yellow fever, safe
from all the worries of the world.... They went out, feet first--to
slow music. What a fine searcher was Walter Reed--but what amazing
luck he had, in those experiments at Camp Lazear....
There was panic in Habana, and mutterings of the mob--and who
can blame that mob, for human life is sacred. But there was
Assistant-Surgeon James Carroll, unsentimental as an embalmer and
before all else a soldier,--he had just then come back to Habana to
settle certain little academic questions. “We can wipe out yellow
fever now, we have proved just how it gets from man to man--_but
what is it causes yellow fever_?” This is what Reed and Carroll asked
each other, and everybody must admit that it was a purely academic
question, and I ask you: was it worth a human life (even of a Spanish
immigrant) to find the answer? Myself I cannot answer yes or no.
But Reed and Carroll answered yes! Starting out as soldiers obeying
orders, as humanitarians risking their hides to save the lives of
men, they had been bitten by the virus of the search for truth,
cold truth--they were enchanted with the glory that comes from the
discovery of unknown things....
They were sure there was no visible bacillus, nor any kind of microbe
that could be seen through the strongest microscope to cause it--they
had looked in the livers of men and the lights of mosquitoes for
such a germ, in vain. But there were other possibilities--magical
possibilities, of a new kind of germ that might be the cause of
yellow fever, an ultra-microbe, too immensely small for the strongest
lens to uncover, revealing its existence only by the murdering of
men with its unseen mysterious poison. That might be the nature
of the germ of yellow fever. Old Friedrich Loeffler--he of the
mustaches--had found such little life making calves sick with
foot-and-mouth disease. And now if Reed and Carroll could show the
microbe of yellow fever belonged to this sub-microscopic world too!
Walter Reed was busy, so he sent James Carroll to Habana to see,
and here you find James Carroll, intensely annoyed because those
experimental cases of Guitéras had died. Guitéras--do you blame
him?--was in a funk. No, Carroll mightn’t draw blood from yellow
fever patients. Indeed not, Carroll mightn’t even bite them with
mosquitoes. What was most silly, Dr. Guitéras would rather not have
Dr. Carroll make post-mortems on the dead cases--it might enrage the
population of Habana. “You can imagine my disappointment!” wrote
Carroll to Walter Reed, with indignant remarks about the frivolous
fears of ignorant populations. But did those deaths stop him? Not
Carroll!
By some unexplained sorceries he got hold of some good poisonous
yellow fever blood, and filtered it through a porcelain filter that
was so fine no visible microbe could get through it. The stuff
that came through that filter Carroll shot under the skin of three
non-immunes (history doesn’t tell how he induced them to stand for
it)--and presto! two of them got yellow fever. Hurrah! Yellow fever
was like foot-and-mouth disease then. Its cause was a germ maybe
too little to see, a microbe that could sneak through fine-grained
porcelain.[1]
Reed wrote to stop him: those deaths were too much--but Carroll
simply _must_ get some contaminated mosquitoes, and by some bold
devilry he did get them, and heigho for this final most horrible
experiment!
“In my own case,” said Carroll, “produced by the bite of a single
mosquito, a fatal result was looked for during several days. I became
so firmly convinced that the severity of the attack depended upon the
susceptibility of an individual rather than on the number of bites he
had got, that on October 9, 1901, at Habana, _I purposely applied to
a non-immune eight mosquitoes (all I had) that had been contaminated
eighteen days before. The attack that followed was a mild one_,”
ended Carroll, triumphantly. But what if that patient had died--as
God knows he might have?
Such was the strangest of that strange crew, and looking back
on this his boldness, in despite of his fanatic prying into
dangerous mysteries, my hat is off to this bald-headed bespectacled
ex-lumberjack searcher. He himself was the first to be hit, it was
Carroll gave the example to those American soldiers, to that civilian
clerk, and to those Spanish immigrants--1, 2, 3, and 4--and to all
the rest of the unknown numbers of them. And do you remember, in the
middle of his attack of yellow fever, that moment when his heart
seemed to stop? In 1907, six years after, Carroll’s heart stopped for
good....
VII
And in 1902, five years before that, Walter Reed, in the prime of
his life, but tired, so tired, died--just as the applause of nations
grew thunderous--of appendicitis. “I am leaving my wife and daughter
so little....” said Walter Reed to his friend Kean, just before the
ether cone went down over his face. “So little....” he mumbled as
the ether let him down into his last dreams. But let us be proud of
our nation, and proud of our Congress--for they voted Mrs. Emilie
Laurence Reed, wife of the man who has saved the world no one knows
what millions of dollars--let us say nothing of lives--they voted
her a handsome pension, of fifteen hundred dollars a year! And the
same for the widow of Lazear, and the same for the widow of James
Carroll--and surely that was handsome for them, because, as one
committee of senators quaintly said: “They can still help themselves.”
But what of Private Kissenger, of Ohio, who stood that test, in the
interest of science--and for humanity? He didn’t die from yellow
fever. And they prevailed upon him, at last, to accept one hundred
and fifteen dollars and a gold watch, which was presented to him in
the presence of the officers and men of Columbia barracks. He didn’t
die--but what was worse, as the yellow fever germs went out of him,
a paralysis crept into him--now he sits, counting the hours on his
gold watch. But what luck! At the last account he had a good wife to
support him by taking in washing.
And what of the others? Time is too short to deal with those
others--and besides I do not know what has become of them. So it is
that this strange crew has made rendezvous, each one with his special
and particular fate--this strange crew who put the capstone on that
most marvelous ten years of the microbe hunters, that crew who worked
together so that now, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison
of yellow fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins....
So it is that the good death fighter, David Bruce, should eat his
words: “It is impossible, at present, to experiment with human
beings.”
FOOTNOTE:
1 A spiral-shaped microbe has recently been brought forward as the
cause of yellow fever, but this discovery has not yet been confirmed.