Walter Reed

American physician

• Born: September 13, 1851
• Birthplace: Belroi, Virginia
• Died: November 22, 1902
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Reed served as the head of the commission that designed and conducted the experiments that proved that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquito bites, thus making control of this terrible disease possible and enabling the construction of projects such as the Panama Canal.

Early Life

Walter Reed was the youngest of five children. His mother, Pharaba White, was the first wife of his father, Lemuel Sutton Reed, a Methodist minister. From the first, it seemed as if Reed were destined to live a gypsylike existence. As an adult, he would reside in a nearly endless series of army camps; as a child, his family moved frequently as his father was sent to parish after parish in the regions of southeastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina. In 1865, however, the Reeds achieved some stability with a move to Charlottesville, Virginia, and Walter was able to attend school with some regularity. In 1866, he entered the University of Virginia, receiving a medical degree in 1869.

Feeling the need for more clinical experience, Reed next enrolled in the medical school of Bellevue Hospital in were chosen, where, at the age of nineteen, he completed study for his second medical degree. A year’s internship followed in New York’s Infant’s Hospital, after which he became a physician in two other hospitals in the New York area while also serving as a sanitary inspector for the Brooklyn Board of Health.

Life’s Work

Unhappy with the insecurity of life as a public physician, yet having no good prospects for private practice, Reed decided upon a career in the military and, in 1875, passed the examinations that earned for him a commission as first lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps. He married Emilie Lawrence in 1876, and shortly afterward was transferred to Fort Lowell in Arizona. His wife soon joined him, and their son Lawrence was born in 1877. A daughter, Blossom, followed in 1883. The Reed children lived much the same restless life as their father had as a youngster as they followed him in almost annual moves from army post to army post in Arizona, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Alabama.

These wanderings in the West were interrupted briefly in 1889, when Reed was appointed surgeon for army recruits in Baltimore. While stationed there, he sought and was given permission to work in Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he took courses in bacteriology and pathology. It was not, however, until 1893, when Reed returned to the East to stay, that his career finally began to flourish. In that year, he was promoted to the rank of major, assigned the position of professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy at the recently established Army Medical School in Washington, D.C., and given the position of curator of the Army Medical Museum as well.

In 1896, Reed received his first real opportunity to demonstrate his ability as a medical investigator when he tracked down the cause of near-epidemic malaria among troops in the Washington barracks and in nearby Fort Myer, Virginia. In addition, in 1898, he chaired a committee that investigated the spread of typhoid fever in army camps. All this was excellent preparation for the task that Reed was about to undertake, and the task for which he is famous—that of resolving the riddle of yellow fever’s transmission.

Yellow fever had been the scourge of the Caribbean Islands and the regions bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, as well as other port cities in North America and Brazil, for more than two centuries and had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Its abrupt but mysterious appearances and disappearances had long been the subject of controversy among physicians. Many believed the disease to be contagious, while many others were convinced that it was caused by local climatic conditions that created poisoned air (miasmata). By the end of the nineteenth century, much of the medical world had accepted the contagionists’ view, believing that the disease was spread by fomites (items such as clothing or bedding used by a yellow fever victim).

For at least a century, a few physicians had been skeptical of both explanations. Dr. John Crawford of Baltimore is sometimes credited with advancing a mosquito theory toward the end of the eighteenth century, as are Josiah Nott of Mobile, Alabama, and the French naturalist Louis Daniel Beauperthuy at about the midpoint in the nineteenth century. The real credit for a mosquito theory, however, belongs to the Cuban physician Carlos Juan Finlay, who, in 1881, not only suggested that mosquitoes were responsible for the transmission of yellow fever but also narrowed the focus to the Aëdes aegypti (then called Stegomyia fasciata) mosquito. Finlay’s difficulty was that he could not prove his theory.

In 1896, an Italian physician, Giuseppe Sanarelli, claimed to have isolated the causative agent of yellow fever, and Reed, along with army physician James Carroll, was assigned the task of investigating that claim. They soon demonstrated it to be groundless, but this was only the beginning of Reed’s work on yellow fever. He volunteered for duty during the war with Spain over the question of Cuban independence, but only got to Cuba after the war was over, arriving in Havana in 1899, to investigate a typhoid outbreak, and again in 1900, as the head of a commission sent to investigate the reasons for an outbreak of yellow fever among American troops still stationed on the island. Carroll, Aristides Agramonte y Simoni, and Jesse Lazear made up the remainder of the commission.

At first, they made little progress with yellow fever, for their efforts were directed toward showing that the bacillus that Sanarelli believed to cause yellow fever was actually part of the group of hog cholera bacillus. It was only after Reed had investigated an outbreak of a disease originally thought to be malaria among soldiers in Pinar del Rio that the commission settled down to its task. The disease in question turned out to be yellow fever, and the circumstances surrounding the death of one of the soldiers who had been a prisoner and locked in a cell particularly intrigued Reed because none of his cellmates had gotten yellow fever, not even the one who had taken his bunk and bedding. This fact seemed to discredit the fomite theory, and Reed wrote later that at this point he began to suspect that some insect was capable of transmitting the disease.

It was also at this point that several important findings began to converge. In 1894, Sir Patrick Manson had suggested that mosquitoes might be responsible for the transmission of malaria, and in 1897, Sir Ronald Ross had proved it. On the other hand, malaria was a very different disease from yellow fever. One of the reasons why Finlay had been unable to prove that the Aëdes aegypti mosquito was responsible for spreading yellow fever was that he (and everyone else) was unaware of the long period (generally nine to sixteen days) of incubation the yellow fever virus requires in the stomach of a mosquito before that mosquito is capable of passing the disease along to a human host. In May of 1900, Henry Rose Carter of the United States Marine Hospital Service published his observations on outbreaks of the disease in Mississippi that for the first time revealed the lengthy incubation period.

Then, in the summer of 1900, the members of the commission met with Finlay, who placed the records of his experiments at their disposal. They had decided to test Finlay’s theory using human subjects for the experiments.

Reed returned to Washington but was back in Cuba in September, upon learning that Lazear, who had permitted himself to be bitten by an infected mosquito, was dead from yellow fever and that Carroll was seriously ill with the disease. It seemed that Finlay had indeed been correct, and Reed at this juncture designed and conducted the experiments that produced twenty-two more cases in soldier volunteers, proving once and for all that the female Aëdes aegypti mosquito was responsible for epidemic yellow fever. Armed with this knowledge, Major W. C. Gorgas was able to free Havana of the disease quickly and then eradicate it in Panama (making construction of the canal possible), while others wiped out yellow fever in urban centers elsewhere in the hemisphere. More than three decades would elapse before another form of the disease called jungle yellow fever would be discovered in some of the monkey populations of that area and in those of Africa. With this discovery came the realization that the disease could not be completely eradicated, but only controlled.

Reed did not live long enough to see the whole of this triumph of humankind over yellow fever. After completing his experiments in Cuba, he returned, in 1901, to Washington, a hero and the recipient of many honors. He resumed his teaching duties but died in late 1902 of complications that developed following surgery on his ruptured appendix.

Significance

In no small part because of a sensationalist American press, Reed (as Cuban physicians and historians in particular have pointed out) has probably received too much credit for the solution of the age-old mystery of yellow fever’s transmission. However, Reed himself was always modest about his role in the matter and quick to pass along that credit to Finlay, and to his associates Carroll, Lazear, and Agramonte.

In truth, however, Reed was entitled to a lion’s share of the credit. Finlay had not been able to prove the truth of his mosquito hypothesis, and Reed’s colleagues were narrow specialists; Carroll was a bacteriologist, Lazear, a mosquito specialist, and Agramonte, a pathologist. Thus, it was Reed who successfully drew the work of these and others together and organized the experiments that made the final definitive breakthrough.

Although his early career gives no hint of this kind of ability, his activities in investigating malaria and typhoid outbreaks during the years immediately prior to his yellow fever work surely prepared him well for that work. In all these undertakings, Reed revealed a fine scientific mind, and his success in the tropical medicine field, heretofore dominated by Europeans, brought much prestige to American science and American scientific education. Thus it is fitting that the small monument over his resting place in Arlington National Cemetery bears the inscription, “He gave to man control over that dreadful scourge Yellow Fever.”

Bibliography

Bean, William B. Walter Reed: A Biography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982. Despite its lack of documentation, it is clear that this study, by the leading authority on Reed, has been extensively researched, and as a full-length biography it has the virtue of providing a balanced account of Reed’s life rather than concentrating excessively on his yellow fever work alone. Thus, it provides an excellent description of medicine and the military between the Civil War and the war with Spain.

Carter, Henry Rose. Yellow Fever: An Epidemiological and Historical Study of Its Place of Origin. Edited by Laura Armistead Carter and Wade Hampton Frost. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1931. The author, himself one of the major actors in the drama of the conquest of yellow fever, provides a thorough examination of the history of the disease as well as an account of its ultimate surrender to science.

Chappell, Gordon S. “Surgeon at Fort Sidney: Captain Walter Reed’s Experiences, 1883-1884.” Nebraska History 54 (1973): 419-443. Focuses on Reed’s year of service as the chief medical officer at Fort Sidney, a Nebraska military post. An interesting glimpse of a slice of Reed’s early career.

Dormandy, Thomas. Moments of Truth: Four Creators of Modern Medicine. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2003. Part 4 of this book contains six chapters examining Reed’s life, career, and contributions to modern medicine.

Gilmore, Hugh R. “Malaria at Washington Barracks and Fort Myer.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 29 (1955): 346-351. This is a brief description of the careful epidemiological investigation of a malaria outbreak among soldiers in the Washington, D.C., area carried out by Reed in 1896.

Kelly, Howard A. Walter Reed and Yellow Fever. 3d rev. ed. Baltimore: Norman, Remington, 1923. The first scholarly and satisfactory biography of Reed despite its uncritical nature. It traces his life from birth to death, but, as the title indicates, it places most of the emphasis on the work done by Reed and his associates on yellow fever.

Pierce, John R., and Jim Writer. Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered Its Deadly Secrets. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2005. Chronicles the rise and fall of yellow fever, focusing on the impact of the disease in America. Describes Reed’s successful efforts to eradicate the disease.

Truby, Albert E. Memoir of Walter Reed: The Yellow Fever Episode. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1943. This work, as the title indicates, is not biographical in nature but rather concentrates on the methods and techniques employed by Reed and his colleagues to demonstrate that the mosquito was indeed the carrier of yellow fever. In the process, the study also provides a fine background sketch of the Army Medical Corps and the conditions in Cuba with which Reed met upon his arrival.