The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation (37 page)

Reed’s reference to human experimentation came from his July 24th letter to Sternberg.

The story of Reed’s return trip to the United States was taken from Truby’s account—including Reed’s joke about the “Rollins.”

The best book I’ve found on vivisection and the source for much of this chapter is Susan Lederer’s
Subjected to Science.
I also consultedLawrence Altman’s
Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine.

Information about Edward Jenner’s experiments on his son was taken from Greer Williams’s
Virus Hunters.

The study that George Sternberg and Walter Reed conducted on children in orphanages was published in 1895 in
Transactions of the Association of American Physicians
as “Report on Immunity against Vaccination Conferred upon the Monkey by Use of the Serum of the Vaccinated Calf and Monkey.”

The Tennyson quote comes from his poem “In the Children’s Hospital,” published in
The Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson.
The reference to the poem was found in Lederer’s book.

The dates surrounding the time the board first visited Carlos Finlay were kept purposely vague. Some accounts claim that the Yellow Fever Board first visited Finlay in early July, just after their arrival. Other accounts say it didn’t happen until early August. There is no definitive proof either way.

Much of the details surrounding Carroll’s infection came from Agramonte’s account, as well as Philip S. Hench’s speech “The Conquest of Yellow Fever,” written on January 1, 1955. I also found details about the illness that Lazear wrote in his logbook, now held at the New York Academy of Medicine.

Lazear’s mention of trying to find the real yellow fever germ rather than bothering with Sanarelli came from a letter written to wife, Mabel, on August 23, 1900. His reference to the distance seeming very great at a time like this was found in a letter to his mother dated August 27, 1900. Both letters are held in the Hench collection.

Carroll’s impression of the mosquito hypothesis—that it was useless—come from his own words in a letter to an editor on June 26, 1903.

I pieced together the scene of Carroll’s first symptoms of the illness from a few different sources. The description of sea bathing came from a letter that Lazear wrote to his mother on September 18, 1900, describing the water as feeling as warm as the air. Dr. William Bean’s book,
Walter Reed,
also offers Alva Sherman Pinto’s recollection of that afternoon.

The details about Carroll’s illness were taken from Agramonte’s account, Lena Warner’s personal account of nursing Carroll and Howard A. Kelly’s book.

The scene in which William E. Dean is infected has been debated over the years. In some accounts, including a popular play called
Yellow Jack,
Dean was infected knowingly or unknowingly while he was bedridden and recovering in Las Animas Hospital. For this book, I based the scene on Agramonte’s own account, as he was one of the four members of the board.

Reed’s letters to Kean during Carroll’s illness, as well as his letter to Carroll on September 7, 1900, are held in the Hench collection.

Lazear’s letter to his wife, Mabel, was written on September 8, 1900, and is held in the Hench collection. I refer to the debate over the resulting tragedy as one that continued through the next five decades because a number of historians and participants attempted to explain what happened. Philip S. Hench was still piecing the story together in the 1940s and 1950s—five decades after the incident.

The description of the hospital room at Las Animas is based on a photograph held in the Hench collection. For a time, that room was marked with a plaque in honor of Jesse Lazear. The information about
Aedes aegypti
as a vector came from Robert Desowitz’s
Mosquito.

The scene in this hospital room is a re-creation from Agramonte’s
The Inside History of a Great Medical Discovery.
This was the story Jesse Lazear adamantly told colleagues—he never wavered from this account. His colleagues agreed that the story did not seem reasonable—Lazear would have known exactly what kind of mosquito landed on his arm, and he was far too meticulous to have let it go at that. Reed, Agramonte and Carroll all believed Lazear himself was the “Guinea Pig” in his logbook. Nonetheless, they assumed Lazear had his reasons for not telling the truth— reasons that even today are a mystery—so they kept to the story Lazear himself had told just before he died.

All information and recordings from the logbook were taken from the book itself on my visit to the New York Academy of Medicine.

Details about how Lazear spent his time—sea bathing and reading each night before bed—came from a letter he wrote to his mother on September 18, 1900. The quote about how much he missed Houston is also taken from that letter.

Lazear’s complaint about feeling “out of sorts” came from Agramonte’s account, and the description of how Lazear spent that first night with yellow fever—organizing his notes—was taken from Truby’s
Memoir of Walter Reed.
In that book, Truby also describes the following morning when Lazear was taken by litter out of his home and moved into the yellow fever ward.

There are several references in Truby’s writings and Gustav Lambert’s account to Lena Warner nursing both James Carroll and Jesse Lazear. Warner’s own account is full of inaccuracies, even untruths. Whenever taking facts directly from her account, I was sure to find a second or third source to back up her claims. I used creative license in the section where Warner remembers her own case of yellow fever. Her writings refer to how the incident stayed with her, so it seems natural to assume nursing fever patients took her back to that place and time.

The description of the record book required by the chief surgeon is based on my visit to the National Library of Medicine where the original record books can be found. All that is left of Jesse Lazear’s is his fever chart, which is part of the Hench collection.

James Carroll’s remark about being profoundly shaken by the sight of his friend came from his interview with Caroline Latimer, published in
A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography.
Agramonte’s impression was found in his
The Inside History of a Great Medical Discovery.

Walter Reed’s letter to Carroll was written on September 24, 1900, and Reed’s letter to Jefferson Randolph Kean was written on September 25, 1900. Both letters are held in the Hench collection.

The description of Lazear’s spiraling illness and eventual death were based on Lena Warner’s “Recollections of Lena A. Warner.” Similar details were taken from Gustav Lambert’s account, Truby’s memoir and Hench’s research. His fever chart shows his temperature falling from 104 to 99 degrees, where it flatlined. In trying to do justice to Lazear’s horrible death, I relied wholly on facts recorded by others—his running madly around the room destroying things and the vomit roiling over the bar. In that instance, it is not bars of the cot but the mosquito bar and netting hanging over the hospital bed. The only point when I added a detail not explicitly described firsthand was in restraining Lazear. Warner recalled two soldiers having to hold him down and restrain him, but there is no record of
how
they restrained him. In this account, I presumed they tied his wrists and ankles.

A copy of Jesse Lazear’s death certificate can be found in the Hench collection, and the original is at the National Library of Medicine. The account of his burial was based on Truby’s description. There have been discrepancies about whether or not James Carroll was present at the funeral. Reed was in the United States, and Agramonte had just been sent there on orders from General Wood (copies of those orders are in the Hench collection). Some sources have excluded Carroll’s presence or said that no members of the board were present; however, James Carroll wrote to his wife, Jennie, on September 28, 1900, that he had just returned from Lazear’s burial.

Details of how Mabel Lazear learned of her husband’s death come from Hench’s “An Illustrated Talk by Philip S. Hench” on January 31, 1955, as well as Hench’s “Interview with Jefferson Randolph Kean,” on January 6, 1944. Mabel’s letter to Carroll, dated November 10, 1900, is part of the Hench collection.

The account of Reed retrieving Lazear’s logbook is based on Truby’s account, as well as Bean’s
Walter Reed.

Details of Walter Reed’s return to Cuba aboard the
Crook
were part of Hench’s “The Conquest of Yellow Fever.” The account of Robert P. Cooke sharing a cabin with Reed comes from
Yellow Jack.
The letter reprimanding Cooke, written on July 24, 1900, was written by the acting chief surgeon, Alexander Stark. The letter is part of the Hench collection.

Statistics about the yellow fever epidemic in Havana that year came from Bean’s book.

Reed’s general depression over the death of Lazear was noticed by Truby, as well as others at Camp Columbia. He also wrote to Emilie about it. His guilt at being in the United States while his board self-experimented was recorded in his letter to Kean on September 25, 1900.

Truby’s
Memoir of Walter Reed
describes the following weeks when Reed wrote and researched his paper on yellow fever. He also related the scene when Reed questioned William Dean about his yellow fever case. Reed’s paper “The Etiology of Yellow Fever: A Preliminary Note” can be found in the Hench collection and at the National Library of Medicine. The excerpt from the
Indianapolis Journal
was taken from a letter by Mary Fishback to Philip S. Hench, August 30, 1940. The
New York Times
quote about the presentation appeared in their “Topics of the Times” on November 10, 1900. The criticism from the
Washington Post
was published on November 2, 1900.

The letter in which Sternberg informs Reed that he has submitted the paper for publication was dated October 23, 1900, and is part of the Hench collection. That paper appeared in the
Philadelphia Medical Journal
on October 27.

The account of Reed meeting with General Wood in the Governor’s Palace, Havana, to request money for Camp Lazear was written in “A Review of Dr. Howard A. Kelly’s Book
Walter Reed and Yellow Fever,
” by Kean. The review was never published, but is held in the Hench collection.

Details about the development of Camp Lazear came primarily from Agramonte’s account. Carroll later denied that Agramonte had anything to do with selecting the site for the camp, but it made the most sense to have Agramonte scout out a location. He had lived in Cuba the longest, and the final location of the camp was on a farm belonging to some of his friends—Finca San Jose in Marianao outside of Havana.

The description of LaRoche’s books was based on personal observation. I looked through a copy of the original 1853 publication at the library of Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. And the account of Reed quoting LaRoche, the storm that destroyed their batch of mosquitoes and the hunt for new ones, all came from Truby.

The dimensions and details about Building No. 1 (the Infected Clothing Building) and Building No. 2 (Infected Mosquito Building) came from a number of sources. First and foremost, in 2005, I visited the site of what remains of Camp Lazear in Marianao, which is now a slum section outside of Havana. Only Building No. 1 still stands, but it was discovered by Hench and John Moran in the 1940s and returned to its original state as part of a memorial park dedicated to the yellow fever experiments. Hench worked with a number of medical officials and the Cuban government under Batista to renovate the building and erect a memorial wall. By the time I visited in 2005, few people in Havana knew where the park was, and the building was in a state of disrepair. However, it was still the same dimensions that Reed designed, and looking through broken boards I could see remains of the original tongue and groove construction, although the wood was rotting in a number of places and patched together in others.

Other descriptions of the building came from Reed’s hand-drawn plans, Truby’s account and “Memorandum on Yellow Fever Experiments,” written by Robert P. Cooke in 1940. Additional details about the men’s experience inside the building came from Agramonte’s article.

The majority of information about John Moran, how he came to be one of the volunteers, his stay in the Infected Mosquito Building and his resulting illness came from his own unpublished autobiography
Memoirs of a Human Guinea Pig,
written at Hench’s request in 1937.

The story of Major Peterson was told in an account written by Kean on May 8, 1941, the
Recollections of Lena A. Warner
and
Recollections of Personal Experiences in Connection with Yellow Fever
by Chauncey Baker. All three sources can be found in the Hench collection.

Information about Roger Post Ames came from Moran’s account, as well as the account of Gustav Lambert, Ames’s nurse.

Lawrence Reed’s remark about the veracity of Reed’s famous statement to Moran and Kissinger came from an interview with Lawrence and Blossom Reed by Hench on November 21, 1946.

Reed’s written recommendation for John Moran was found in Moran’s
My Date with Walter Reed and Yellow Jack.
Both Reed and Moran were on the same transport back to the U.S. Reed approached Moran and gave him the recommendation, adding that he should have done it long before then.

The account of procuring the Spanish volunteers at the Immigration Station came from Agramonte. And the details about the consent form came from Bean’s book,
Walter Reed.

The description of the experiments performed on John Kissinger came from his own account given to Hench, “Memorandum: Experiences with the Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba 1900, by John R. Kissinger.” The details about how the men responded to Kissinger as a hero from that point forward was found in an account written by Paul L. Tate on July 27, 1954, for Hench. Tate also provided the “old army saying.”