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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