Walter Reed was a U. S. Army physician and head of the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission.
Background
Walter Reed traced his ancestry to a sturdy county family of Northumberland, England. His father, Lemuel Sutton Reed, a North Carolinian by birth, spent forty years of his life in the ministry of the Methodist Church in Virginia. His first wife, Walter's mother, was Pharaba White, daughter of a North Carolina planter, also of English descent. Walter, youngest of a family of six, was born at Belroi, Gloucester County, Virginia. In 1852 the father was moved to a pastorate at Farmville, Prince Edward County, and there Walter spent the first years of his life.
Education
He began his education in a private school. His schooling, although somewhat interrupted by the Civil War, was well advanced when the family moved to Charlottesville in 1866. Here he attended a private school for one year and the following year entered the University of Virginia at the age of sixteen. After a year in the academic department and one in the medical school, he was given his medical degree in 1869, before he was eighteen. Proceeding to New York, he matriculated at the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, where he received a second degree of M. D. in 1870.
In the summer of 1902, Harvard University conferred upon him the honorary degree of A. M. and shortly afterward the University of Michigan gave him the degree of LL. D.
Career
Following an interneship at the Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, he was employed by the board of health of New York and then by that of Brooklyn. In 1874, while in Brooklyn, Reed decided to try for an appointment in the Medical Corps of the United States Army. Having passed the prescribed examination, he was commissioned as assistant surgeon with the rank of first lieutenant in June 1875.
After a year's duty at Willet's Point, New York, he was ordered to Fort Lowell, Ariz. , where began eleven years of frontier garrison life. It was in these surroundings, unfavorable in opportunities for study and intellectual contacts but rich in experiences calling for initiative and ingenuity, that he laid the foundation for his career as a scientist.
In 1890, feeling the need of post-graduate study, he asked for leave of absence for that purpose, but was instead ordered to Baltimore as attending surgeon and examiner of recruits, with authority to pursue study at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. After completing a brief course in clinical medicine he was attached to the pathological laboratory, where he specialized in the comparatively new science of bacteriology. This course was directed by Professor William H. Welch and his assistants, Councilman, Abbott, Nuttall, and Flexner, with all of whom Reed formed lasting ties of friendship.
In 1893 he was promoted to the grade of major and in this same year was detailed as curator of the Army Medical Museum at Washington and as professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy at the newly organized Army Medical School. About the same time, Dr. James Carroll, then a hospital steward, was assigned to duty as Reed's assistant at the School. In the years preceding the Spanish-American War, Reed interested himself especially in the bacteriology of erysipelas and diphtheria.
He was an early champion of the treatment of diphtheria by antitoxin and of governmental control of the preparation of such biologic remedies. In 1898, he was appointed chairman of a committee charged with the investigation of the causes and mode of transmission of typhoid fever, then epidemic in the camps of the United States volunteers. The other members were Dr. Victor C. Vaughan, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Dr. Edward O. Shakespeare of Philadelphia. The report of this committee showed the relative unimportance of water transmission in this epidemic and the hitherto little suspected importance of transmission by flies and dust and of contact infections.
Published in 1904 under the title Report on the Origin and Spread of Typhoid Fever in U. S. Military Camps during the Spanish War of 1898, this exhaustive work will always be of value in future studies of the epidemiology of this disease.
Reed's practical interest in yellow fever began with the somewhat premature announcement, in July 1897, of the Bacillus icteroides as an alleged specific causative agent, by the Italian scientist, Dr. Giuseppe Sanarelli.
Reed and Dr. James Carroll were designated by Surgeon-General George Miller Sternberg to investigate the status of the Sanarelli bacillus in relation to Sternberg's hypothetical Bacillus X. In an article entitled "Bacillus icteroides and Bacillus cholerae suis, " published in Medical News, April 29, 1899, they demonstrated that the Bacillus icteroides had no causal relationship whatever.
When, in 1900, the disease made its appearance among American troops in Havana, a commission of medical officers of the United States Army was appointed to investigate its cause and mode of transmission. Reed was placed at its head, the other members being Dr. Carroll, then acting assistant surgeon, Dr. Jesse W. Lazear, and Dr. Aristides Agramonte.
Reed was the planning head of the commission and exercised general superintendence, Carroll was the bacteriologist, Lazear the entomologist, and Agramonte the pathologist. From observation of an outbreak at Pinar del Rio, soon after his arrival in Cuba, Reed was practically convinced that fomites were insignificant as agencies in the transmission of the disease. Further work upon the Bacillus icteroides confirmed his convictions that it was at most a secondary invader, and he decided to turn from the search of the specific cause and pursue the method of transmission. The theory of mosquito transmission of yellow fever was put forward as early as 1854, by Beauperthuy, who even attributed it to the "striped variety, " that is, to the Stegomyia.
In 1881, Dr. Carlos J. Finlay of Havana advanced the same theory. Then followed the work of Ronald Ross and of Grassi and his associates on mosquito transmission of malaria. In May 1900 Dr. Henry Rose Carter had published an article calling attention to the so-called "extrinsic incubation" of yellow fever, the period of time necessary for the "infection of the environment. " Whatever weight these several factors may have had, the commission decided to investigate the possibility of transmission by the Stegomyia mosquito. It was at once realized that experimentation with human subjects would be necessary, but that the results, if positive, would fully justify the procedure. In the first uncontrolled experiments, Lazear applied mosquitoes which had fed upon yellow-fever blood to himself, to Carroll, and to some others.
From one of these bites Carroll developed the first experimental case of the disease. He was seriously ill for a time, but recovered, although with a damaged heart. Then followed the case of XY, the first soldier volunteer (Private William H. Dean). In these early experiments, Lazear had direct charge of the handling of mosquitoes.
He was accidentally bitten by an infected mosquito and died of yellow fever nine days later, on September 26, 1900. Reed had meanwhile been called to the United States and was there at the time of Carroll's illness and of Lazear's death.
Upon his return to Cuba, on October 1, Reed took up the work on controlled experiments, with Dr. Agramonte in charge of the care and handling of the mosquitoes. In all, twenty-two cases of experimental yellow fever were thus produced, happily without fatal result. Of these, fourteen were infected by mosquito bites, six by injections of blood, and two by injections of filtered blood serum.
Coincident with the mosquito experimentation Reed had constructed a detached building where for twenty nights Dr. Robert P. Cook and a group of soldiers slept in close contact with the clothing and bedding of yellow-fever patients from the Camp Lazear hospital. No case of illness resulted from any of these contacts. Thus was demolished the deeply rooted belief in the danger of fomites in this disease.
The work of the commission covered the seven months from June 25, 1900, to Feburary 4, 1901. In that time it was conclusively proved that yellow fever is transmitted by the mosquito then called Stegomyia fasciata, but later definitely classified as Aëdes ægypti. It was further shown that the case infecting the mosquito must be of less than four days' duration, and that there must elapse a period of at least twelve days for incubation of the virus in the mosquito. The mosquito, once infected, was shown to remain so for at least fifty-seven days. It was proved that the disease could be produced by injections of blood from a fresh case, and that the serum remaining after filtration of this blood was equally infective. The fruits of the commission's labors were quickly made evident.
In 1900, there were 1, 400 cases of yellow fever in Havana. The attack upon the mosquito began in February 1901 and during that year there were but thirty-seven cases of the disease in the whole of Cuba.
In 1902, there was not a single case. With its method of transmission known, there is no longer a yellow-fever hazard in the United States, and New Orleans, formerly harassed by the disease, knows it only as a memory.
Reed returned to Washington in February 1901 and resumed his work at the Army Medical School and as professor of pathology and bacteriology in the Columbian University Medical School. In his preoccupation with his teaching, he neglected the warning pains of a chronic appendicitis until November 17, 1902, when his friend, Maj. William C. Borden, found an irreparable condition which caused his death five days later.
Only a few days before his death, he was appointed librarian of the Army Medical Library. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Achievements
Reed's name will always be associated with the work of the Yellow Fever Commission and with the consequent control of the disease. His was the planning and supervising mind, although the detailed work was largely done by his colleagues, to whom he always gave generous credit for the commission's achievements. His writings began with The Contagiousness of Erysipelas in 1892. During the next ten years he contributed, either alone or in collaboration, thirty articles to periodical literature. His earlier writings covered a variety of medical subjects, while the later ones were largely on the subject of yellow fever.
The great general hospital of the Army Medical Center at Washington, D. C. , has been named in his honor.
Personality
Reed was of a lively, happy disposition, enthusiastic and optimistic in everything to which he turned his hand. He was sociable and companionable, with a special gift for conversation and for medical teaching. To this attractive personality was added an attractive exterior. He was a little above medium height, with a spare, graceful figure well suited to a military uniform.
Connections
He was married, in 1876, to Amelia Lawrence, daughter of John Vaughan Lawrence, a planter of Murfreesboro, North Carolina. They had two children: a daughter and a son who became an officer of infantry in the United States Army. They also had adopted aboriginal American child.
