CHAPTER VI
The Walter Reed Chapter
In three tremendous years of achievement, from 1898 to the end of 1900, Maj. Walter Reed, Curator of the Army Medical Museum, and professor in the Army Medical School, wrote imperishable pages in the history of medicine.
First, as president of an Army Board of medical officers set up to investigate the typhoid fever epidemic in the camps within the United States, he helped to broaden the understanding of the ways in which typhoid spreads—an essential step in the triumph of the next decade over that disease, to be dealt with in a subsequent chapter of this story.
And then, after the field work of the Typhoid Board was completed but before its report was compiled and published, Reed was called upon to head another board of medical officers to investigate infectious diseases in Cuba, which was to discover, and prove beyond a doubt, the method of transmission of the most dreaded disease of the Tropics—yellow fever.
Yellow Fever Epidemics
Yellow fever, indeed, was more than a tropical disease. Endemic in the American tropics, it had an unaccountable and disconcerting way of breaking out in epidemic form in the cities and villages of the Temperate Zone of North America. In at least 35 years of the 18th century, yellow fever invaded the United States, extending as far north as Nantucket Island, where 259 persons died of it in 1763, and New York, where there were 2,300 deaths in 1798, and raching a climax of destructiveness in 1793, with 4,041 deaths in 6 weeks among the 40,144 inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the Capital City of the Nation.
The 19th century was even worse, with invasions in at least 77 years, rising upon occasion to great epidemics such as those of 1853, which took 7,848 lives in New Orleans; of 1855, with 2,670 deaths in New Orleans and 2,000 in Norfolk; of 1878, when 4,046 died in New Orleans and 5,150 in Memphis; and as many more in smaller and scattered communities in the Mississippi Valley.713-028*— 64 !)
