Microbe Hunters/Chapter 11

With yellow fever it was different—there were no brawls about it.

Everybody is agreed that Walter Reed—head of the Yellow Fever Commission—was a courteous man and a blameless one, that he was a mild man and a logical: there is not one particle of doubt he had to risk human lives; animals simply will not catch yellow fever!

Then it is certain that the ex-lumberjack, James Carroll, was perfectly ready to let go his own life to prove Reed's point, and he was not too sentimental about the lives of others when he needed to prove a point—which might and might not be what you would call a major point.

All Cubans (who were on the spot and ought to know) are agreed that those American soldiers who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs were brave beyond imagining. All Americans who were then in Cuba are sure that those Spanish immigrants who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs were not brave, but money-loving—for didn't each one of them get two hundred dollars?

Of course you might protest that fate hit Jesse Lazear a hard knock—but it was his own fault: why didn't he brush that mosquito off the back of his hand instead of letting her drink her fill? Then, too, fate has been kind to his memory; the United States Government named a Battery in Baltimore Harbor in his honor! And that same government has been more than ​kind to his wife: the widow Lazear gets a pension of fifteen hundred dollars a year! You see, there are no arguments—and that makes it fun to tell this story of yellow fever. And aside from the pleasure, it has to be told: this history is absolutely necessary to the book of Microbe Hunters. It vindicates Pasteur! At last Pasteur, from his handsome tomb in that basement in Paris, can tell the world: "I told you so!" Because, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins; in a few years there may not be a single speck of that virus left on earth—it will be as completely extinct as the dinosaurs—unless there is a catch in the fine gruesome experiments of Reed and his Spanish immigrants and American soldiers. . . .

It was a grand coöperative fight, that scotching of the yellow jack. It was fought by a strange crew, and the fight was begun by a curious old man, with enviable mutton chop whiskers—his name was Doctor Carlos Finlay—who made an amazingly right guess, who was a terrible muddler at experiments, who was considered by all good Cubans and wise doctors to be a Theorizing Old Fool. What a crazy crank is Finlay, said everybody.

For everybody knew just how to fight that most panic-striking plague, yellow fever; everybody had a different idea of just how to combat it. You should fumigate silks and satins and possessions of folks before they left yellow fever towns—no! that is not enough: you should burn them. You should bury, burn, and utterly destroy these silks and satins and possessions before they come into yellow fever towns. It was wise not to shake hands with friends whose families were dying of yellow fever; it was perfectly safe to shake hands with them. It was best to burn down houses where yellow fever had lurked—no! it was enough to smoke them out with sulphur. But there was one thing nearly everybody in North, Central, and South America had been agreed upon for nearly two hundred years, and that was this: when folks of a town began to turn yellow and hiccup and vomit black, by ​scores, by hundreds, every day—the only thing to do was to get up and get out of that town. Because the yellow murderer had a way of crawling through walls and slithering along the ground and popping around corners—it could even pass through fires!—it could die and rise from the dead, that yellow murderer; and after everybody (including the very best physicians) had fought it by doing as many contrary things as they could think of as frantically as they could do them—the yellow jack kept on killing, until suddenly it got fed up with killing. In North America that always came with the frosts in the fall. . . .

This was the state of scientific knowledge about yellow fever up to the year 1900. But from between his mutton chop whiskers Carlos Finlay of Habana howled in a scornful wilderness: "You are all wrong—yellow fever is caused by a mosquito!"

There was a bad state of affairs in San Cristobal de Habana in Cuba in 1900. The yellow jack had killed thousands more American soldiers than the bullets of the Spaniards had killed. And it wasn't like most diseases, which considerately pounce upon poor dirty people—it had killed more than one-third of the officers of General Leonard Wood's staff, and staff officers—as all soldiers know—are the cleanest of all officers and the best protected. General Wood had thundered orders; Habana had been scrubbed; happy dirty Cubans had been made into unhappy clean Cubans—"No stone had been left unturned"—in vain! There was more yellow fever in Habana than there had been in twenty years!

Cablegrams from Habana to Washington and on June 25th of 1900 Major Walter Reed came to Quemados in Cuba with orders to "give special attention to questions relating to the cause and prevention of yellow fever." It was a big order. Considering who the man Walter Reed was, it was altogether too big an order. Pasteur had tried it! Of course, in certain ways—though you would say they had nothing to do with ​hunting microbes—Walter Reed had qualifications. He was the best of soldiers; fourteen years and more he had served on the western plains and mountains; he had been a brave angel flying through blizzards to the bedsides of sick settlers—he had shunned the dangers of beer and bottle-pool in the officers' mess and resisted the seductions of alcoholic nights at draw poker. He had a strong moral nature. He was gentle. But it will take a genius to dig out this microbe of the yellow jack, you say—and are geniuses gentle? Just the same, you will see that this job needed particularly a strong moral nature, and then, besides, since 1891 Walter Reed had been doing a bit of microbe hunting. He had done some odd jobs of searching at the very best medical school under the most eminent professor of microbe hunting in America—and that professor had known Robert Koch, intimately.

So Walter Reed came to Quemados, and as he went into the yellow fever hospital there, more than enough young American soldiers passed him, going out, on their backs, feet first. . . . There were going to be plenty of cases to work on all right—fatal cases! Dr. James Carroll was with Walter Reed, and he was not what you would call gentle, but you will see in a moment what a soldier-searcher James Carroll was. And Reed found Jesse Lazear waiting for him—Lazear was a European-trained microbe hunter, aged thirty-four, with a wife and two babies in the States, and with doom in his eyes. Finally there was Aristides Agramonte (who was a Cuban)—it was to be his job to cut up the dead bodies, and very well he did that job, though he never became famous because he had had yellow fever already and so ran no risks. These four were the Yellow Fever Commission.

The first thing the Commission did was to fail to find any microbe whatever in the first eighteen cases of yellow fever that they probed into. There were many severe cases in those eighteen; there were four of those eighteen cases who died; there was not one of those eighteen cases that they didn't claw through from stem to gudgeon, so to speak, drawing blood, ​making cultures, cutting up the dead ones, making endless careful cultures—and not one bacillus did they find. All the time—it was July and the very worst time for yellow fever—the soldiers were coming out of the hospital of Las Animas feet first. The Commmission failed absolutely to find any cause, but that failure put them on the right track. That is one of the humors of microbe hunting—the way men make their finds! Theobald Smith found out about those ticks because he had faith in certain farmers; Ronald Ross found out the doings of those gray mosquitoes because Patrick Manson told him to; Grassi discovered the zanzarone carrying malaria because he was patriotic. And now Walter Reed had failed in the very first part—and anybody would say it was the most important part—of his work. What to do? There was nothing to do. And so Reed had time to hear the voice of that Theorizing Old Fool, Dr. Carlos Finlay, of Habana, shouting: "Yellow fever is caused by a mosquito!"

The Commission went to call on Dr. Finlay, and that old gentleman—everybody had laughed at him, nobody had listened to him—was very glad to explain his fool theory to the Commission. He told them the ingenious but vague reasons why he thought it was mosquitoes carried yellow fever; he showed them records of those awful experiments, which would convince nobody; he gave them some little black eggs shaped like cigars and said: "Those are the eggs of the criminal!" And Walter Reed took those eggs, and gave them to Lazear, who had been in Italy and knew a thing or two about mosquitoes, and Lazear put the eggs into a warm place to hatch into wigglers, which presently wiggled themselves into extremely pretty mosquitoes, with silver markings on their backs—markings that looked like a lyre. Now Walter Reed had failed, but you have to give him credit for being a sharp-eyed man with plenty of common sense—and then too, as you will see, he was extraordinarily lucky. While he was failing to find bacilli, even in the dreadful cases, with bloodshot eyes and chests yellow as gold, with hiccoughs and with those prophetic retchings—while ​he was failing, Walter Reed noticed that the nurses who handled those cases, were soiled by those cases, never got yellow fever! They were non-immunes too, those nurses, but they didn't get yellow fever.

"If this disease were cause by bacillus, like cholera, or plague, some of those nurses certainly should get it," argued Walter Reed to his Commission.

Then all kinds of strange tricks of yellow fever struck Walter Reed. He watched cases of the disease pop up most weirdly in Quemados. A man in a hose in 102 Real Street came down with it; then it jumped around the corner to 20 General Lee Street, and from there it hopped across the road—and not one of these families had anything to do with each other, hadn't seen each other, even!

"That smells like something carrying the disease through the air to those houses," said Reed. There were various other exceedingly strange things about yellow fever—they had been discovered by an American, Carter. A man came down with yellow fever in a house. For two or three weeks nothing more happened—the man might die, he might have got better and gone away, but at the end of that two weeks, bang! a bunch of other cases broke out in that house. "That two weeks makes it look as if the virus were taking time to grow in some insect," said Reed, to his Commission who thought it was silly, but they were soldiers.

"So we will try Finlay's notion about mosquitoes," saiw Walter Reed, for all of the just mentioned reasons, but particularly because there was nothing else for the Commission to do.

That was easy to say, but how to go with it? Everybody knew perfectly well that you cannot give yellow fever to any animal—not even to a monkey or an ape. To make any kind of experiment to prove mosquitoes carry yellow fever you must have experimental animals, and that meant nothing more nor less than human animals. But give human beings yellow fever! In some epidemics—there were records of them!—eighty-five men out of a hundred died of it. in some fifty out of every ​hundred—almost never less than twenty out of every hundred. It would be murder! But that is where the strong moral nature of Walter Reed came to help him. Here was a blameless man, a Christian man, and a man—though he was mild—who was mad to help his fellow men. And if you could prove that yellow fever was only carried by mosquitoes. . . .

So, on one hot night after a day among dying men at Pinar del Rio, he faced his Commission: "If the members of the Commission take the risk first—if they let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes that have fed on yellow fever cases, that will set an example to American soldiers, and then—" Reed looked at Lazear, and then at James Carroll.

"I am ready to take a bite," said Jesse Lazear, who had a wife and two small children.

"You can count on me, sir," said James Carroll, whose total assets were his searcher's brain, and his miserable pay as an assistant-surgeon in the army. (His liabilities were a wife and five children.)

Then Walter Reed (he had been called home to Washington to make a report on work done in the Spanish War) gave elaborate instructions to Carroll and Lazear and Agramonte. They were secret instructions, and savage instructions, when you consider the mild man he was. It was an immoral business—it was a breach of discipline in its way, for Walter Reed then had no permission from the high military authorities to start it. So Reed left for Washington, and Lazear and Carroll set off on the wildest, most daring journey any two microbe hunters had ever taken. Lazear? You could not see the doom in his eyes—the gleam of the searcher outshone it. Carroll? That was a soldier who cared no damn for death or courts-martial— Carroll was a microbe hunter of the great line. . . .

Lazear went down between the rows of beds on which lay men, doomed men with faces yellow as the leaves of autumn, ​delirious men with bloodshot eyes. He bit those men with his silver-striped she-mosquitoes; carefully he carried these blood-filled beasts back to their glass homes, in which were little saucers of water and little lumps of sugar. Here the she-mosquitoes digested their meal of yellow fever blood, and buzzed a little, and waited for the test.

"We should remember malaria," Reed had told Lazear and Carroll. "In that disease it takes two or three weeks for the mosquito to become dangerous—maybe it’s the same here."

But look at the bold face of Jesse Lazear, and tell me if that was a patient man! Not he. Somehow he collected seven volunteers, who so far as I can find have remained nameless, since the test was done in dark secrecy. To these seven men— whom for all I know he may have shanghaied—but first of all to himself, Lazear applied those mosquitoes who a few days before had fed on men who now were dead. . . .

But alas, they all stayed fit as fiddles, and that discouraged Lazear.

But there was James Carroll. For years he had been the right-hand man of Walter Reed. He had come into the army as a buck private and had been a corporal and a sergeant for years—obeying orders was burned into his very bones—and Major Reed had said: "Try mosquitoes!" What is more, what Major Reed thought was right, James Carroll thought was right, too, and Major Reed thought there was something in the notion of that Old Theorizing Fool. But in the army, thoughts are secondary—Major Reed had left them saying: "Try mosquitoes!"

So James Carroll reminded the discouraged Lazear: "I am ready!" He told Lazear to bring out the most dangerous mosquito in his collection—not one that had bitten only a single case, but he must use a mosquito that had bitten many cases—and they must be bad cases—of yellow fever. That mosquito must be as dangerous as possible! On the twenty-seventh of August, Jesse Lazear picked out what he thought to be his champion mosquito, and this creature, which had fed on four ​cases of yellow fever, two of them severe ones, settled down on the arm of James Carroll.

That soldier watched her while she felt around with her stinger. . . . What did he think as he watched her swell into a bright balloon with his blood? Nobody knows. But he could think, what everybody knows: "I am forty-six years old, and in yellow fever the older the fewer—get better." He was forty-six years old. He had a wife and five children, but that evening James Carroll wrote to Walter Reed:

"If there is anything in the mosquito theory, I should get a good dose of yellow fever!" He did.

Two days later he felt tired and didn't want to visit patients in the yellow fever ward. Two days after that he was really sick: "I must have malaria!" he cried, and went to the laboratory under his own power, to squint at his own blood under the microscope. But no malaria. That night his eyes were blood-shot, his face a dusky red. The next morning Lazear packed Carroll off to the yellow fever wards, and there he lay, near to death for days and days. . . . There was one minute when he thought his heart had stopped . . . and that, as you will see, was a bad minute for Assistant-Surgeon Carroll.

He always said those were the proudest days of his life. "I was the first case to come down with yellow fever after the experimental bite of a mosquito!" said Carroll.

Then there was that American private soldier they called "X.Y."—these outlaw searchers called him "X.Y.," though he was really William Dean, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. While James Carroll was having his first headaches, they bit this X.Y. with four mosquitoes—the one that nearly killed Carroll, and then three other silver-striped beauties besides, who had fed on six men that were fairly sick, and four men that were very sick with yellow fever and two men that died.

Now everything was fine with the experiments of Quemados. Eight men had been bitten, it is true, and were fit as fiddles—but the last two, James Carroll and X.Y., they were real experimental guinea-pigs, those two, they had both got yellow fever— ​and James Carroll's heart had nearly stopped, but now they were both getting better, and Carroll was on the heights, writing to Walter Reed, waiting proudly for his chief to come back—to show him the records. Only Jesse Lazear was a little cynical about these two cases, because Lazear was a fine experimenter, a tight one, a man who had to have every condition just so, like a real searcher—and, thought Lazear, "It is too bad seeing the nerve of Carroll and X.Y.—but both of them exposed themselves in dangerous zones once or twice, before they came down. It wasn't an absolutely perfect experiment—it isn’t sure that my mosquitoes gave them yellow fever!" So Lazear was skeptical, but orders were orders, and every afternoon he went to those rows of beds at Las Animas, in the room with the faint strange smell, and here he turned his test-tubes upside-down on the arms of boys with bloodshot eyes, and let his she-mosquitoes suck their fill. But September 13th was a bad day, it was an unlucky day for Jesse Lazear, for while he was at this silly job of feeding his mosquitoes, a stray mosquito settled down on the back of his hand. "Oh! that's nothing!" he thought. "That wouldn't be the right kind of mosquito anyway!" he muttered, and he let the mosquito drink her fill—though, mind you, she was a stray beast that lived in this ward where men were dying!

That was September 13th.

"On the evening of September 18th . . . Dr. Lazear complained of feeling out of sorts, and had a chill at 8 p.m.," says a hospital record of Las Animas. . . .

"September 19: Twelve o'clock noon," goes on that laconic record, "temperature 102.4 degrees, pulse 112. Eyes injected, face suffused. [That means bloodshot and red] . . . 6 p.m. temperature 103.8 degrees, pulse, 106. Jaundice appeared on the third day. The subsequent history of this case was one of progressive and fatal yellow fever" [and the record softens a little], "the death of our lamented colleague having occurred on the evening of September 25, 1900."

Then Reed came back to Cuba, and Carroll met him with enthusiasm, and Walter Reed was sad for Lazear, but very happy about those two successful cases of Carroll and X.Y.—and then, and then (brushing aside tears for Lazear) even in that there was the Hand of God, there was something for Science: "As Dr. Lazear was bitten by a mosquito while present in the wards of a yellow fever hospital," wrote Walter Reed, "one must, at least, admit the possibility of this insect's contamination by a previous bite of a yellow fever patient. This case of accidental infection therefore cannot fail to be of interest. . . ."

"Now it is my turn to take the bite!" said Walter Reed, but he was fifty years old, and they persuaded him not to. "But we must prove it!" he insisted, so gently, that, hearing his musical voice and looking at his chin that did not stick out like the chin of a he-man, you might think Walter Reed was wavering (after all, here was one man dead out of three).

"But we must prove it," said that soft voice, and Reed went to General Leonard Wood, and told him the exciting events that had happened. Who could be less of a mollycoddle than this Wood? And he gave Walter Reed permission to go as far as he liked. He gave him money to build a camp of seven tents and two little houses—to say nothing of a flagpole—but what was best of all Wood gave him money to buy men, who would get handsomely paid for taking a sure one chance out of five of never having a chance to spend that money! So Walter Reed said: "Thank you, General," and one mile from Quemados they pitched seven tents and raised a flagpole, and flew an American flag and called that place Camp Lazear (three cheers for Lazear!), and you will see what glorious things occurred there.

Now, nothing is more sure than this: that every man of the great line of microbe hunters is different from every other man of them, but every man Jack of them has one thing in common: they are original. They were all original, excepting Walter ​Reed—whom you cannot say would be shot for his originality, seeing that this business of mosquitoes and various bugs and ticks carrying diseases was very much in the air in those last ten years of the nineteenth century. It was natural for a man to think of that! But he was by all odds the most moral of the great line of microbe hunters—aside from being a very thorough clean-cut experimenter—and now that Walter Reed's moral nature told him: "You must kill men to save them!" he set out to plan a series of air-tight tests—never was there a good man who thought of more hellish and dastardly tests!

And he was exact. Every man about to be bit by a mosquito must stay locked up for days and days and weeks, in that sun-baked Camp Lazear—to keep him away from all danger of accidental contact with yellow fever. There would be no catch in these experiments! And then Walter Reed let it be known, to the American soldiers in Cuba, that there was another war on, a war for the saving of men—were there men who would volunteer? Before the ink was dry on the announcements Private Kissenger of Ohio stepped into his office, and with him came John J. Moran, who wasn't even a soldier—he was a civilian clerk in the office of General Fitzhugh Lee. "You can try it on us, sir!" they told him.

Walter Reed was a thoroughly conscientious man. "But, men, do you realize the danger?" And he told them of the headaches and the hiccups and the black vomit—and he told them of fearful epidemics in which not a man had lived to carry news or tell the horrors . . . .

"We know," said Private Kissenger and John J. Moran of Ohio, "we volunteer solely for the cause of humanity and in the interest of science."

Then Walter Reed told them of the generosity of General Wood. A handsome sum of money they would get—two hundred, maybe three hundred dollars, if the silver-striped she-mosquitoes did things to them that would give them one chance out of five not to spend that money.

​"The one condition on which we volunteer, sir," said Private Kissenger and civilian clerk John J. Moran of Ohio, "is that we get no compensation for it."

To the tip of his cap went the hand of Walter Reed (who was a major): "Gentlemen, I salute you!" And that day Kissenger and John J. Moran went into the preparatory quarantine, that would make them first-class, unquestionable guinea-pigs, above suspicion and beyond reproach. On the 5th of December Kissenger furnished nice full meals for five mosquitoes—two of them had bitten fatal cases fifteen days and nineteen days before. Presto! Five days later he had the devil of a backache, two days more and he was turning yellow—it was a perfect case, and in his quarters Walter Reed thanked God, for Kissenger got better! Then great days came to Reed and Carroll and Agramonte—for, if they weren't exactly overrun with young Americans who were ready to throw away their lives in the interest of science—and for humanity still there were ignorant people, just come to Cuba from Spain, who could very well use two hundred dollars. There were five of these mercenary fellows—whom I shall simply have to call "Spanish immigrants," or I could call them Man 1, 2, 3, and 4—just as microbe hunters often mark animals: "Rabbit 1, 2, 3, and 4—" anyway they were bitten, carefully, by mosquitoes who, when you take averages, were much more dangerous than machine gun bullets. They earned their two hundred dollars—for four out of five of them had nice typical (doctors would look scientific and call them beautiful) cases of yellow fever! It was a triumph! It was sure! Not one of these men had been anywhere near yellow fever—like so many mice they had been kept in their screened tents at Quemados. If they hadn't been ignorant immigrants—hardly more intelligent than animals, you might say—they might have been bored, because nothing had happened to them excepting—the stabs of silver-striped she-mosquitoes. . . .

"Rejoice with me, sweetheart," Walter Reed wrote to his wife, "as, aside from the antitoxin of diphtheria and Koch's dis​covery of the tubercle bacillus, it will be regarded as the most important piece of work, scientifically, during the nineteenth century. . . .

Walter Reed was so thorough that you can call him original, as original as any of the microbe hunters of the great line—for he was certainly original in his thoroughness. He might have called it a day—you would swear he was tempted to call it a day: eight men had got yellow fever from mosquito bites, and only one—what amazing luck!—had died.

"But can yellow fever be carried in any other way?" asked Reed.

Everybody believed that clothing and bedding and possessions of yellow fever victims were deadly—millions of dollars worth of clothing and bedding had been destroyed; the Surgeon-General believed it; every eminent physician in America, North, South and Central (excepting that old fool Finlay) believed it. "But can it?" asked Reed, and while he was being so joyfully successful with Kissenger and Spaniards 1, 2, 3, and 4, carpenters came, and built two ugly little houses in Camp Lazear. House No. 1 was the nastier of these two little houses. It was fourteen feet by twenty, it had two doors cleverly arranged one back of the other so no mosquitoes could get into it, it had two windows looking south—they were on the same side as the door, so no draft could blow through that little house. Then it was furnished with a nice stove, to keep the temperature well above ninety, and there were tubs of water in the house—to keep the air as chokey as the hold of a ship in the tropics. So you see it was an uninhabitable little house—under the best of conditions—but now, on the thirtieth of November in 1900, sweating soldiers carried several tightly nailed suspicious-looking boxes, that came from the yellow fever wards of Las Animas—to make this house altogether cursed. . . .

That night, of the thirtieth of November, Walter Reed and James Carroll were the witnesses of a miracle of bravery, for into this House No. 1 walked a young American doctor named ​Cooke, and two American soldiers, whose names—where are their monuments?—were Folk and Jernegan.

Those three men opened the tightly nailed, suspicious-looking boxes. They opened those boxes inside that house, in air already too sticky for proper breathing.

Phew! There were cursings, there were holdings of noses.

But they went on opening those boxes, and out of them Cooke and Folk and Jernegan took pillows, soiled with the black vomit of men dead of yellow fever; out of them they took sheets and blankets, dirty with the discharges of dying men past helping themselves. They beat those pillows and shook those sheets and blankets—"you must see the yellow fever poison is well spread around that room!" Walter Reed had told them. Then Cooke and Folk and Jernegan made up their little army cots with those pillows and blankets and sheets. They undressed. They lay down on those filthy beds. They tried to sleep—in that room fouler than the dankest of medieval dungeons. . . . And Walter Reed and James Carroll guarded that little house, so tenderly, to see no mosquito got into it, and Folk and Cooke and Jernegan had the very best of food, you may be sure. . . .

Night after night those three lay in that house, wondering perhaps about the welfare of the souls of their predecessors in those sheets and blankets. They lay there, wondering whether anything else besides mosquitoes (though mosquitoes hadn't even been proved to carry it then!) carried yellow fever. . . . Then Walter Reed, who was a moral man and a thorough man, and James Carroll, who was a grim man, came to make their test a little more thorough. More boxes came to them from Las Animas—and when Cooke and Jernegan and Folk unpacked them, they had to rush out of their little house, it was so dreadful.

But they went back in, and they went to sleep. . . .

For twenty nights—where are their monuments?—these three men stayed there, and then they were quarantined in a nice airy tent, to wait for their attack of yellow fever. But ​they gained weight. They felt fit as fiddles. They made vast jokes about their dirty house and their perilous sheets and blankets. They were happy as so many schoolboys when they heard Kissenger and those Spaniards (1, 2, 3, and 4) had really got the yellow jack after the mosquito bites. What a marvelous proof, you will say, but what a dastardly experiment—but for the insanely scientific Walter Reed that most dastardly experiment was not marvelous enough! Three more American boys went in there, and for twenty nights slept in new unspeakable sheets and blankets—with this little refinement of the experiment: they slept in the very pajamas in which yellow fever victims had died. And then for twenty more nights three other American lads went into House No. 1, and slept that way—with this additional little refinement of the experiment: they slept on pillows covered with towels soaked with the blood of men whom the yellow jack had killed.

But they all stayed fit as fiddles! Not a soul of these nine men had so much as a touch of yellow fever! How wonderful is science, thought Walter Reed. "So," he wrote, "the bubble of the belief that clothing can transmit yellow fever was pricked by the first touch of human experimentation." Walter Reed was right. It is true, science is wonderful. But science is cruel, microbe hunting can be heartless, and that relentless devil that was the experimenter in Walter Reed kept asking: "But is your experiment really sound?" None of those men who slept in House No. 1 got yellow fever, that is true—but how do you know they were susceptible to yellow fever? Maybe they were naturally immune! Then Reed and Carroll, who had already asked as much of Folk and Jernegan as any captain has ever asked of any soldier—so it was that Reed and Carroll now shot virulent yellow fever blood under the skin of Jernegan, so it was they bit Folk with mosquitoes who had fed on fatal cases of yellow fever. They both came down with wracking pains and flushed faces and bloodshot eyes. They both came through their Valley of the Shadow. "Thank God," ​murmured Reed—but especially Walter Reed thanked God he had proved those two boys were not immune during those twenty hot stinking nights in House No. 1.

For these deeds Warren Gladsden Jernegan and Levi E. Folk were generously rewarded with a purse of three hundred dollars—which in those days was a lot of money.

While these tests were going on John J. Moran, that civilian clerk from Ohio, whom Walter Reed had paid the honor of a salute, was a very disappointed man. He had absolutely refused to be paid; he had volunteered in "the interest of science and for the cause of humanity," he had been bitten by those silver-striped Stegomyia mosquitoes (the bug experts just then thought this was the proper name for that mosquito)—he had been stabbed several times by several choice poisonous ones, but he hadn't come down with yellow fever, alas, he stayed fit as a fiddle. What to do with John J. Moran?

"I have it!" said Walter Reed. "This to do with John J. Moran!"

So there was built, close by that detestable little House No. 1, another little house, called House No. 2. That was a comfortable house! It had windows on the side opposite to its door, so that a fine trade wind played through it. It was cool. It had a nice clean cot in it, with steam-disinfected bedding. It would have been an excellent house for a consumptive to get better in. It was a thoroughly sanitary little house. Half way across the inside of it was a screen, from top to bottom, a fine-meshed screen that the tiniest mosquito found it impossible to fly through. At 12 o'clock noon on the twenty-first of December in 1900, this John J. Moran (who was a hog for these tests) "clad only in a nightshirt and fresh from a bath" walked into this healthy little house. Five minutes before Reed and Carroll had opened a glass jar in that room, and out of that jar flew fifteen she-mosquitoes, thirsty for blood, whining for a ​meal of blood, and each and every one of those fifteen mosquitoes, had fed, on various days before—on the blood of yellow-faced boys in the hospital of Las Animas.

Clad only in a nightshirt and fresh from a bath, Moran—who knows of him now?—walked into the healthy little room and lay down on his clean cot. In a minute that damned buzzing started round his head, in two minutes he was bitten, in the thirty minutes he lay there he was stabbed seven times—without even the satisfaction of smashing those mosquitoes. You remember Mr. Sola, whom Grassi tortured—he probably had his worried moments—but all Mr. Sola had to look forward to was a little attack of malaria and a good dose of curative quinine to get him out of it. But Moran? But John J. Moran was a hog for such tests! He was back there at four-thirty the same afternoon, to be bitten again, and once more the next day—to satisfy the rest of the hungry she-mosquitoes who hadn't found him the first day. In the other room of this house, with only a fine meshed but perfect wire screen between them and Moran—and the mosquitoes—lay two other boys, and those two boys slept in that house safely for eighteen nights.

But Moran?

On Christmas morning of 1900, there was a fine present waiting for him—in his head, how that thumped—in his eyes, how red they were and how the light hurt them—in his bones, how tired they were! A nasty knock those mosquitoes had hit him and he came within a hair of dying but (thank God! murmured Walter Reed) he was saved, this Moran, to live the rest of his life in an obscurity he didn't deserve. So Moran had his wish—in the interest of science, and for humanity! So he, with Folk and Jernegan and Cooke and all those others proved that the dirty pest hole of a house (with no mosquitoes) was safe; and that the clean house (but with mosquitoes) was dangerous, so dangerous! So at last Walter Reed had every answer to his diabolical questions, and he wrote, in that old-fashioned prose of his: "The essential factor in the infection of a building ​with yellow fever is the presence therein of mosquitoes that have bitten cases of yellow fever."

It was so simple. It was true. That was all. That was that. And Walter Reed wrote to his wife:

"The prayer that has been mine for twenty years, that I might be permitted in some way or at some time to do something to alleviate human suffering has been granted! A thousand Happy New Years. . . . Hark, there go the twenty-four buglers in concert, all sounding taps for the old year!"

They were sounding taps, were those buglers, for the searcher that was Jesse Lazear, and for the scourge of yellow fever that could now be wiped from the earth. They were blowing their bugles, those musicians, to celebrate—as you will see—the fate that waited for that little commission after a too short hour of triumph. . . .

Then the world came to Habana, and there was acclaim for Walter Reed, and the customary solemn discussions and doubts and arguments of the learned men who came. William Crawford Gorgas (who was another blameless man!) grooming himself for the immortality of Panama, went into the gutters and cesspools and cisterns of Habana, making horrid war on the Stegomyia mosquitoes, and in ninety days, Habana had not a single case of yellow jack—she was free for the first time in two hundred years. It was magical! But still there came learned doctors, and solemn bearded physicians, from Europe and America, asking this, questioning that—and one morning fifteen of these skeptics were in the mosquito room of the laboratory—oh! they were from Missouri! "These are remarkable experiments, but the results should be weighed and considered with reserve . . . et cetera!" Then the gauze lid came off a jar of she-mosquitoes (of course it was by accident) and into the room, with wicked lustful eyes on those learned scientists the Stegomyia buzzed. Alas for skepticism! Away ​went all doubts! From the room rushed the eminent sevants of knowledge! Down went the screen door with a crash—such was the vehemence of their conviction that Welter Reed was right. (Though it happened that this particular jar of mosquitoes was not contaminated.)

Then William Crawford Gorgas and John Guitéras—he was a great Cuban authority on yellow jack—they were convinced too by those experiments at Camp Lazear, and they were full of excellent plans to put those experiments in practice—fine plans, but rash plans, alas. "It is remarkable," said Gorgas and Guitéras, "that these experimental cases at Camp Lazear didn't die—they had typical yellow fever, but they got better. maybe because Reed put them to bed so quickly." Then they proceeded to play with fire. "We will give newly arrived non-immune immigrants yellow fever—a smart attack of it, but a safe attack of it." They planned this, when it really was so easy to wipe out yellow fever simply by warring on the Stegomyia, which does not breed in secret places, which is a very domestic mosquito! "And at the same time we can confirm Reed's results," thought Gorgas and Guitéras.

The immigrants (of course they were very ignorant people) came; the immigrants listened and were told it was safe; seven immigrants and a bold young American nurse were bitten by the poisoned Stegomyia. And of these eight, two immigrants and the bold young American nurse went out from the hospital, safe from another attack of yellow fever, safe from all the worries of the world. . . . They went out, feet first—to slow music. What a fine searcher was Walter Reed—but what amazing luck he had, in those experiments at Camp Lazear. . . .

There was panic in Habana, and mutterings of the mob—and who can blame that mob, for human life is sacred. But there was Assistant Surgeon James Carroll, unsentimental as an embalmer and before all else a soldier,—he had just then come back to Habana to settle certain little academic questions. "We can wipe out yellow fever now, we have proved ​just how it gets from man to man—but what is it causes yellow fever?" This is what Reed and Carroll asked each other, and everybody must admit that it was a purely academic question, and I ask you: was it worth a human life (even of a Spanish immigrant) to find the answer? Myself I cannot answer yes or no. But Reed and Carroll answered yes! Starting out as soldiers obeying orders, as humanitarians risking their hides to save the lives of men, they had been bitten by the virus of the search for truth, cold truth—they were enchanted with the glory that comes from the discovery of unknown things. . . .

They were sure there was no visible bacillus, nor any kind of microbe that could be seen through the strongest microscope to cause it—they had looked in the livers of men and the lights of mosquitoes for such a germ, in vain. But there were other possibilities—magical possibilities, of a new kind of germ that might be cause of yellow fever, an ultra-microbe, too immensely small for the strongest lens to uncover, revealing its existence only by the murdering of men with its unseen mysterious poison. That might be the nature of the germ of yellow fever. Old Friedrich Loeffler—he of the mustaches—had found such little life making calves sick with food-and-mouth disease. And now if Reed and Carroll could show the microbe of yellow fever belonged to this sub-microscopic world too!

Walter Reed was busy, so he sent James Carroll to Habana to see, and here you find James Carroll, intensely annoyed because those experimental cases of Guitéras had died. Guitéras—do you blame him?—was in a funk. No, Carroll mightn't draw blood from yellow fever patients. Indeed not, Carroll mightn't even bite them with mosquitoes. What was most silly, Dr. Guitéras would rather not have Dr. Caroll make post-mortems on the dead cases—it might enrage the population of Habana. "You can imagine my disappointment!" wrote Carroll to Walter Reed, with indignant remarks about the frivolous fears of ignorant populations. But did those deaths stop him? Not Carroll!

By some unexplained sorceries he got hold of some good ​poisonous yellow fever blood, and filtered it through a porcelain filter that was so fine no visible microbe could get through it. The stuff that came through that filter Carroll shot under the skin of three non-immunes (history doesn't tell how he induced them to stand for it)—and presto! two of them got yellow fever. Hurrah! Yellow fever was like foot-and-mouth disease then. Its cause was a germ maybe too little to see, a microbe that could sneak through fine-grained porcelain.^[1]

Reed wrote to stope him: those deaths were too much—but Carroll simply must get some contaminated mosquitoes and by some bold devilry he did get them, and heigho for this final most horrible experiment!

"In my own case," said Carroll, "produced by the bite of a single mosquito, a fatal result was looked for during several days. I became so firmly convinced that the severity of the attack depended upon the susceptibility of an individual rather than on the number of bites he had got, that on October 9, 1901, at Habana, I purposely applied to a non-immune eight mosquitoes (all I had) that had been contaminated eighteen days before. The attack that followed was a mild one," ended Carroll, triumphantly. But what if that patient had died—as God know he might have?

Such was the strangest of that strange crew, and looking back on this his boldness, in despite of his fanatic prying into dangerous mysteries, my hat is off to this bald-headed bespectacled ex-lumberjack searcher. He himself was the first to be hit, it was Carroll gave the example to those American soldiers, to that civilian clerk, and to those Spanish immigrants—1, 2, 3, and 4—and to all the rest of the unknown numbers of them. And do you remember, in the middle of his attack of yellow fever, that moment when his heart seemed to stop? In 1907, six years after, Carroll's heart stopped for good. . . .

An in 1902, five years before that, Walter Reed, in the ​prime of his life, but tired, so tired, died—just as the applause of nations grew thunderous—of appendicitis. "I am leaving my wife and daughter so little . . ." said Walter Reed to his friend Kean, just before the ether cone went done over his face. "So little . . " he mumbled as the ether let him down into his last dreams. But let us be proud of our nation and proud of our Congress—for they voted Mrs. Emilie Laurence Reed, wife of the man who has saved the world no one know what millions of dollars—let us say nothing of lives—they voted her a handsome pension, of fifteen hundred dollars a year! And the same for the widow of Lazear, and the same for the widow of James Carroll—and surely that was handsome for them, because, as one committee of senators quaintly said: "They can still help themselves."

But what of Private Kissinger, of Ohio, who stood that test, in the interest of science—and for humanity? He didn't die from yellow fever. And they prevailed upon him, at last, to accept one hundred and fifteen dollars and a gold watch, which was presented to him in the presence of the officers and men of Columbia barracks. He didn't die—but what was worse, as the yellow fever germs went out of him, a paralysis crept into him—now he sits, counting the hours on his gold watch. But what luck! At the last account he had a good wife to support him by taking in washing.

And what of the others? Time is too short to deal with those others—and besides I do not know what has become of them. So it is that this strange crew has made rendezvous, each one with his special and particular fate—this strange crew who put the capstone on that most marvelous ten years of the microbe hunters, that crew who worked together so that now, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins. . . .

So it is that the good death-fighter, David Bruce, should eat his words: "It is impossible, at present, to experiment with human beings."