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By Root 317 0

after the Regular Army troops had pulled out. By the end of June, Camp Thomas teemed with nearly sixty thousand green recruits and fifteen thousand horses and mules. One line officer remarked how the Volunteers had turned the campground into “a mass of putrefaction.” No amount of quicklime could overcome it. For the American public, the typhoid horror stories told by the troops at Camp Thomas recalled the Confederate prisoner of war camp at Andersonville. “Bad Water, Unfit Food, Brutally Stupid Treatment,” read one New York Times headline. More than ten thousand soldiers contracted typhoid fever at Camp Thomas that summer; 761 of them died. Even more unseemly was Camp Alger, an assembly center just an hour’s ride from the Washington offices of the camp’s namesake, Secretary of War Russell A. Alger. With its drinking wells driven too close to the regimental sinks, Camp Alger had become a “nursery of typhoid.” Soldiers at the Florida encampments—Camp Tampa and Camp Cuba Libre—suffered, too. In all, nearly 21,000 American soldiers caught the disease in the national encampments during the summer of 1898, and 1,590 died. Most of the dead were Volunteers.32

Close on the heels of the camp typhoid epidemics came the highly publicized withdrawal from Cuba of the Fifth Corps, overwhelmed by typhoid, yellow fever, and malaria. With the fighting finished on the island by July 17, Colonel Roosevelt warned that 90 percent of the soldiers were incapacitated by disease and would, as The New York Times put it, “die like sheep if left in Cuba.” The plight of the Fifth Corps—compounded, some said, by Major General William Shafter’s refusal to cooperate with his medical officers—confirmed the public’s worst fears: America was sending its young men to do battle with tropical diseases more deadly than Spanish cannon.33

The health crises in the assembly camps and the Fifth Corps tarnished the reputation of the War Department and emboldened critics of the war. In September 1898, shortly after the cessation of hostilities, President McKinley appointed a presidential commission, headed up by General Grenville M. Dodge, to investigate the “charges of criminal neglect of the soldiers in camp and field and hospital.” The Dodge Commission’s report, released to the White House in February 1899 and made public the following year, concluded that the Army Medical Department, for all of the “good work” it had done during the war, had committed “manifest errors,” beginning with its failure to properly investigate the sanitary conditions of the assembly camps. Modern scientific knowledge and professionalism had not yet usurped the age-old dominance of disease over combat in the actuarial tables of warfare.34

The tragedy of the assembly camps would continue to haunt and motivate the surgeons of the Army Medical Department as they settled into new positions with occupying regiments and the U.S. military governments in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The shame of the assembly camps heightened the Medical Department’s obsession with the health of the troops on the ground. It contributed to the intensity with which the Army prosecuted its sanitation and vaccination campaigns in all three places. And it gave additional motivation to the scientific work of the Army medical men as they pursued exciting new lines of research.

In 1901, Walter Reed and a team of colleagues in Cuba, in a bold and risky series of experiments, confirmed the Cuban physician Carlos Finlay’s theory that yellow fever was spread by the Stegomyia fasciata mosquito (now called the Aedes aegypti). Under the command of Major William C. Gorgas, the Army launched a campaign to destroy the mosquito’s breeding grounds in Havana. By the summer of 1901, the Stegomyia had virtually disappeared from Havana, and so had yellow fever. Reed expressed his relief in a private letter to Gorgas. “Thank God that the Medical Department of the U.S. Army, which got such a ‘black eye’ during the Spanish-American War, has during the past year accomplished work that will always remain to its eternal credit.