ALBERT ROSS VAIL AND EMILY MCCLELLAN VAIL
Many of the things we take for granted today—electricity, telephones, airplanes, medicines, computers, and so on—come from the tireless work of scientists and inventors. Some of these men and women are America’s great doctors: Dr. Walter Reed and his helpers, Dr. Carrol and Dr. Lazear. Because of their important work, diseases that were once incurable can now be treated. The following passage describes the selfless work of men in the medical community to benefit the lives of thousands of people. Here are people dedicated to the health of the polis, literally understood. Today, many men injured or wounded in the service of America recuperate at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which is named in honor of Dr. Walter Reed.
A scientist gets his knowledge, first, through hard study. Walter Reed loved his books. He could study twenty hours a day. When he became sleepy he just thought of all there was in the book before him that he did not know; then he set to work again, fresh and vigorous. He was but seventeen years old when he graduated from college at Charlottesville, Virginia, and was given a physician’s diploma,—the youngest man who had ever taken a medical degree at the University of Virginia.
He decided at his graduation to give his life to helping those who were sick. He would try to forget himself and his comfort and think only of destroying disease and making sick people well.
For the first six years after his graduation he worked among the poor in the hospitals and the slums of New York City. Then he was appointed by the government to be an army surgeon, and went with a regiment of the government’s soldiers out to Arizona.
Some of the western states were very wild in those days. His first post was six hundred miles from a railroad. Indian tribes were all around him, but he was not in the least afraid of them. He took care of them in their illnesses just as he had cared for the poor in Brooklyn. He always gave his best service to those who were poor and could not pay him.
Sometimes he was ill in bed with a fever, but if word came that someone else was ill and needed him he would get up and dress, holding to a chair perhaps to steady himself, and would start off to see his patient.
Once he started out at sundown for the cabin of a sick woman twelve miles away. The temperature was below zero and a storm which had arisen during the day had grown into a blizzard. The blizzard was so terrible that even horses turned and fled before its oncoming fury. Yet he was able to drive his horse through it all, wandering for hours hither and thither in the blinding snow until at last he reached the cabin at midnight.
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The Indians soon learned to love him, he was so kind to them. They wanted to show him how much they loved him. So when he and Mrs. Reed were away from home they would creep into their house with presents. When Dr. and Mrs. Reed came back they might find a great piece of venison lying on the dresser in Mrs. Reed’s bedroom, or perhaps a picture would have been taken down from the wall and the piece of venison hung on the nail in its place. The Indians would all be gone.
Ever cheerful, useful, undaunted, for eighteen years this soldier-doctor fought weather and disease in frontier camps. Then he was called to be a professor of medicine and a scientific investigator in the United States Army Medical School at Washington. This brought him the chance to do another kind of service to mankind. His training as an unselfish and heroic doctor had prepared him to become a hero in scientific discovery.
There are two ways to insure health to a person. One way is to cure him after he is ill. The other and better way is to destroy the causes of illness and prevent his ever getting sick at all. To find and destroy the cause of disease is the greatest service of medical science.
Between the years 1880 and 1900 wonderful discoveries were made by the scientists who worked in their laboratories about the causes of such diseases as diphtheria, malaria, and pneumonia. These scientists found that people become ill with a fever in the strangest way. Tiny little beings, so small that they can be seen only under a microscope, will enter a man’s body when he breathes dust or drinks bad water. These little beings are called germs, or bacteria, and they will stay in his body and often make him ill. One kind of bacteria is the germ of typhoid fever. Another kind causes tuberculosis; another, yellow fever. Now, dust and bad water and bad food are full of such bacteria. So the scientists said people must be careful to breathe pure air, drink clean water, and eat good food, and to keep so vigorous that the body will resist these intruders.
Then they discovered that there are other and still stranger ways by which these germs get into people’s bodies. Dr. Reed, in his laboratory work at Washington, found that flies carry the germs, sometimes millions of them, on their legs, and leave them wherever they go. During the Spanish-American war hundreds of soldiers became ill with typhoid fever. Dr. Reed was asked to go to the camps and discover the cause of this spread of typhoid. He found it was because the soldiers ate food over which the flies had crawled. He showed that the men’s tents and provisions must be protected by screens; then they would not have these fevers.
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Yellow fever was a foe which preyed upon the people of America and Cuba. For years it had devastated Havana. Again and again it swept through America’s southern states. One time it caused the death of eight thousand people in New Orleans. Again, it killed one person in every ten in Philadelphia.
Some one had suggested that a mosquito, if it bit a person ill with yellow fever took the fever germs into its body. Then, flying elsewhere, it would bite a well person and with the bite would inject into that person’s blood these same germs.
Dr. Reed with four assistants, among whom were Dr. Carrol and Dr. Lazear, decided to prove whether this was true or not. So they went down to Cuba where the yellow fever mosquito, as it is called, was to be found. The best way to study the subject, they decided, would be to let a mosquito which they knew had bitten a yellow fever patient bite them. Of course they might become ill with the fever. Yet what an opportunity for service was theirs! If people could be sure that the mosquito’s bite caused yellow fever then they could destroy the yellow fever mosquito and thousands of lives might be saved. So Dr. Reed and his companions, at the risk of their lives, began their investigations.
Quite fearlessly, Dr. Carrol and Dr. Lazear volunteered to try the experiment on themselves and let the mosquito bite them. They knew this bite might cause their death, but they loved the truth and the service of men more than their own lives, and they gladly took the risk.
After receiving the mosquito’s bite they both became ill with yellow fever. Dr. Carrol was very, very ill, but recovered. Dr. Lazear died in a few days,—a splendid martyr to science and mankind.
Then two young men, soldiers in the army, came to Dr. Reed and offered to try the experiment. Dr. Reed explained to them the risk and offered to pay them. They replied that they would take no money, they wished to offer their lives “solely in the interest of humanity and the cause of science.” Dr. Reed, full of admiration for their nobility of character, touched his cap in military fashion, saying respectfully, “Gentlemen, I salute you.” Then he accepted their services. Later he reported: “In my opinion this exhibition of moral courage has never been surpassed in the annals of the Army of the United States.”
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By their experiments in Cuba Dr. Reed and his devoted companions proved beyond question that yellow fever is transmitted by the mosquito. Soon after, Dr. Reed himself died in Baltimore, at the age of fifty-one. He was worn out by his excessive labors for the sick and the fever-stricken.
As a result of his discoveries the health officers in the South began a war upon the mosquitoes. They dried up pools of water where mosquitoes’ eggs were hatched, or killed the eggs by covering the pools with oil. They also screened the houses more carefully than ever, to keep out the mosquitoes which they could not kill. These precautions brought quick results and the yellow fever epidemics disappeared.
Because some men of science were willing to lay down their lives that other people might live, this plague of the centuries was driven out of our southern cities and Cuba, and in time will be driven from the world.