Walter Reed | Encyclopedia.com

On November 23, 1902, Walter Reed, U.S. Army physician and bacteriologist who proved mosquitoes transmit yellow fever, died at the age of 51. From the article:

"REED, WALTER
(b. Belroi, near Gloucester, Virginia, 13 September 1851; d. Washington, D.C., 23 November 1902)medicine.

Reed was the youngest of the five children of Lemuel Sutton Reed and Pharaba White, both North Carolinians of English descent. His father was a Methodist minister who was called to a new parish every year or two; Reed therefore grew up in a number of communities in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. His schooling was haphazard until late in 1865, when the family moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Reed began two years’ tutelage under the Confederate Lieutenant William R. Abbot, who later became headmaster of Bellevue School, near Bedford, Virginia. Reed studied the traditional subjects of Latin and Greek, English composition, grammar and rhetoric, and history and the humanities. He entered the University of Virginia at the age of fifteen, and after a year was permitted to take the medical course, a nine-month graded curriculum, twice as long as that offered anywhere else in the country. He received the MD. in 1869, standing third in his class of fifty. Reed then went to New York to study at the medical school of Bellevue Hospital; he earned a second M.D. in 1870, when he was eighteen, but the degree was not awarded him officially until he was twenty-one.

Reed then became assistant physician at the New York Infants’ Hospital. In 1871 he was resident physician at Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn, and in 1871–1872 at Brooklyn City Hospital. He simultaneously served as district physician for the New York Department of Public Charities. In June 1873 he was appointed sanitary inspector of the Brooklyn Board of Health. In June of the following year he received a commission as assistant surgeon, with the rank of first lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps and was ordered to a post in Arizona. Before he left for the west he married Emilie Lawrence, whom he had met and become engaged to while on a series of visits to his father in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. For the next eleven years he worked at bases in Arizona (including Fort Apache), Nebraska, Minnesota, and Alabama. His son, Lawrence, was born in Arizona in 1877 and a daughter, Blossom, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1883.

As he neared forty, Reed became restless. He was aware of new discoveries in pathology and bacteriology, but garrison life afforded him no opportunities for further study. He therefore applied for a leave of absence to do advanced work, but was instead ordered to Baltimore, Maryland, as attending surgeon. He was authorized to study at Johns Hopkins Hospital where, after completing a brief clinical course, he undertook the study of pathology under William H. Welch, who early recognized his abilities. Reed did autopsies, learned new pathological techniques, and performed experiments. He was then sent for another two years to another isolated and dreary army outpost at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, but in 1893 was promoted major and, upon the appointment of George Sternberg as surgeon general of the United States, brought to Washington as curator of the Army Medical Museum and professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy at the new Army Medical College. He worked closely with John Shaw Billings in the old Surgeon General’s Library and Army Pathology Museum.

Reed’s early work in Washington is buried in the Reports of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service of the United States. It was not until 1896 that he was first able to demonstrate his skill as a medical investigator, in that year malaria was rampant in the Washington Barracks and at Fort Myer, in Virginia; it was generally believed to be caused by bad drinking water. Reed showed that there were no outbreaks of the disease in other areas of Washington that, like the military bases, obtained drinking water from the swampy Potomac. Moreover, although both officers and enlisted men shared much the same food, water, and housing, malaria was rife among only the enlisted class. The enlisted men would, however, often surreptitiously leave camp at night and go to the city along a trail through the swamps, and Reed was therefore able to state that not the drinking water, but rather the bad air—“malarial” in the ancient and literal sense—was responsible for the disease.

When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 Reed volunteered unsuccessfully for service in Cuba. He was instead appointed chairman of the board that had been hurriedly formed to investigate the outbreak of typhoid that had reached epidemic proportions in most large army camps. Hundreds of new cases of typhoid were found every day and many were of fatal outcome; bad water was again thought to be the mode of transmission of the bacillus, which had recently been identified. The board found that water was of little importance as a vector of the disease, which, they reported, was rather spread by flies and contact with fecal material. In addition, the Typhoid Board contributed to the control of the disease by discovering that it might be transmitted by carriers—persons who harbored the infectious organisms without being ill, or, indeed, without ever having had typhoid fever. The work of the board made it possible to end the epidemic which had killed between fifty and one hundred times as many soldiers as had died in combat or of wounds in Cuba; their massive two-volume report is a model for epidemiologists.

In 1900 Reed was appointed head of an army board to investigate the causes of yellow fever, which had broken out among American troops in Cuba. In the United States yellow fever was an annual scourge; the disease swept up the eastern seaboard and often spread to the Gulf states and up the Mississippi River valley. The places in which it occurred, the season of its occurrence, and the temperature coordinates of its spread were predictable and well known but not understood. No one knew what caused it, and the terror that accompanied it was equaled only by the misapprehension of its nature. A few lucky guesses had been made before Reed took up his work; as early as 1848 the Alabama physician Josiah No had suggested that an insect—perhaps the mosquito—caused the disease, although he had only tenuous evidence, and in 1881 Carlos Finlay, working closely with the United States Yellow Fever Commission in Havana, suggested that yellow fever was transmitted by Culex fasciatus (now called Aëdes aegypti ).

The question of the cause of yellow fever was nonetheless still a vexed one when Reed took it Up. In 1897 the Italian physician Giuseppe Sanarelli had stated that the organism Bacillus icteroides was the specific causative agent, and Sternberg, who also believed yellow fever to be caused by a bacterium, assigned Reed and James Carroll the task of investigating Sanarelli’s claim. Reed and Carroll soon demonstrated that Sanarelli’s organism bore no relationship to yellow fever. It was shortly thereafter that the disease broke out in Havana, invading even the headquarters of the governor, General Leonard Wood, and Reed was sent to Cuba as the head of the Yellow Fever Board, consisting of himself, Carroll, Jesse W. Lazear, and Aristides Agramonte.

Upon arriving in Havana, Reed and his co-workers pursued further investigations of Sanarelli’s Bacillus icteroides and concluded that it was the hog-cholera virus. They then turned to the theory of the mosquito as the vector of yellow fever. Finlay had been conducting experiments along these Lines, and provided them with mosquitoes, mosquito eggs, and instructions for raising the insects in the laboratory. Since there was no laboratory test for yellow fever, Finlay also aided them in the clinical verification of the disease. Reed then designed and conducted the experiments that elucidated the means of transmission of the disease once and for all. He used human subjects of necessity, and Lazear, who was accidentally bitten by an infected mosquito, contracted yellow fever and died; Carroll also became ill with the first experimental case of the disease but recovered. Using soldier volunteers. Reed and his team produced twenty-two other experimental instances of yellow fever, of which none was fatal. These experiments, coupled with the notes that Lazear had left, led Reed and his co-workers to the discoveries about the disease that resulted in its eradication.

Reed and his colleagues discovered that the female Aëdes aegypti mosquito can become infected by biting a victim of yellow fever only during the first three days of the course of the illness; she does not become infectious for two weeks thereafter, but may then remain infectious for up to two months in a warm season. The mosquito does not herself become ill, nor do her eggs, which remain infertile until she has fed on blood, harbor an infection that will affect the brood. The period of incubation of yellow fever is three to five days after the victim has been bitten by an infected mosquito, and having had the disease provides excellent immunity against subsequent attacks. Through experimentation Reed and his group established that whole blood taken from a patient early in the course of the disease will, upon injection into a susceptible person, cause yellow fever. They also determined that blood from an infected person could be passed through a Pasteur filter and still remain infectious; this was thus the first known filterable virus causing a human infection.

Within a year, as a direct result of the work of the Yellow Fever Board, Havana was freed of its age-old plague. Reed lived to see this triumph; he died late in 1902, following surgery for a ruptured appendix and abscess of the cecum which perhaps followed from an amoebic infection that he might easily have contracted in Cuba. Shortly before his death Harvard University awarded him an honorary M.A., citing him as 'Walter Reed, medical graduate of Virginia, the Army Surgeon who planned and directed in Cuba the experiments that have given man control over that fearful scourge, yellow fever.'"