Not until Walter Reed, the American army surgeon, and his coworkers, discovered the relation of the mosquito Stegomyia, to the transmission of yellow fever in 1901 was it possible to conquer this captain of the hosts of death. The Englishman, Ross, had already discovered the relation of another mosquito, the Anopheles, to malaria in 1897 and 1898.
Packard[1] writes of yellow fever: "This terror gave rise to the greatest cruelty ... Many persons were abandoned by their nearest relatives and friends. Bodies were frequently found lying in houses which had been deserted by all other dwellers in them. Women died in childbirth because no one would render them assistance in their hour of need. Wives deserted their husbands, fathers their children, and children their parents." There were also examples of the greatest heroism in the face of what seemed almost certain death. Physicians and ministers, as well as others, obeyed the call of a common humanity in giving aid to the unfortunate.
One hundred years ago purging and bleeding were the standard method of treatment for most ills. In surgery as late as 1867 "laudable pus" was expected after an operation. Even so careful a surgeon as Joseph Lister reported from his own statistics of amputation 45 per cent of fatal cases[2] before he introduced antiseptic surgery in the year named. Asepsis in the present sense did not begin until twenty-four years later.
Abdominal surgery, now an every day occurrence, was a last desperate measure, practiced by the most skillful only. General anaesthesia with ether was unknown until 1846. It had been successfully used by Crawford Long, a country practitioner in Georgia, as early as 1842. Not until Morton's independent discovery and demonstration of its use at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 did it become known to the medical world generally. Whitman of course knew nothing of its use. When Crawford Long in Georgia removed a tumor from the neck of a patient rendered unconscious by ether, Whitman was in far-off Oregon. When Morton, in Boston, successfully demonstrated to the world the use of ether, thirteen
