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WALTER REED

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. . . .

VII

An in 1902, five years before that, Walter Reed, in the

  1. ↑ A spiral-shaped microbe has recently been brought forward as the cause of yellow fever, but this discovery has not yet been confirmed.
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