The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [124]
An Unlikely Hero
The majority of Reed’s biographical information came from Dr. William Bean’s excellent biography Walter Reed, published in 1982. It is a well written and thorough account of Reed’s work in Cuba. Additional information was taken from Howard A. Kelly’s Walter Reed and Yellow Fever, 1906; Laura Wood Roper’s Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, 1943; and Pierce and Writer’s Yellow Jack, 2005. Several personal details and excerpts from letters were taken from the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Collection, which houses a wealth of personal correspondence between Reed and Emilie, as well as other family members, and from the Walter Reed Papers at the National Library of Medicine.
Information about Dr. Luke P. Blackburn was taken from Jane Singer’s “The Fiend in Gray,” published in the Washington Post. Some information regarding Blackburn was also found in Quinn’s 1887 book Heroes and Heroines of Memphis or Reminiscences of the Yellow Fever Epidemics.
Historical information about Johns Hopkins University was taken from three sources: John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza, Roper’s Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform and Kelly’s Walter Reed and Yellow Fever. Kelly, one of the Great Four, worked with Reed at Hopkins.
For the account of the Typhoid Board’s work, I relied on Victor Vaughan’s A Doctor’s Memories. Information about Vaughan’s medical advancements after the Typhoid Board and his quote at the end of the chapter were taken from Barry’s The Great Influenza.
A Meeting of Minds
Many of the descriptive details about the sights, smells, sounds and feel of Havana came from personal experience when I visited the city in December 2005 while researching this book.
According to historian Philip S. Hench, the military camp six miles outside of Havana was known as Camp Columbia during the Spanish-American War. Following the war, the regimental tents were replaced with wooden buildings, and the “army of occupation” moved in, renaming the camp the Columbia Barracks. I use the terms interchangeably since many of the principle characters were still in the habit of calling the barracks Camp Columbia.
To recreate scenes at Camp Columbia, I relied on several different sources: Albert Truby’s Memoir of Walter Reed: The Yellow Fever Episode, Bean’s Walter Reed, Pierce and Writer’s Yellow Jack, as well as personal letters from soldiers who stayed there and Philip S. Hench’s own documentation.
For details about entertainment for the enlisted men and trips to Havana, I used an interview between Philip S. Hench and Paul Tate conducted in 1954.
For the description of Walter Reed’s voyage to Havana in March 1900, I relied on Philip S. Hench’s interview with Lawrence Reed and Blossom Reed in 1946. Information about electrozone and Reed’s work with it was taken from Reed’s own report to the surgeon general, dated April 20, 1900, and Truby’s Memoir of Walter Reed.
For information about Jesse W. Lazear, I used a number of sources, including Philip S. Hench’s biographical notes on Lazear, photographs from Lazear’s own photo album in Cuba, photographs from the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Collection at the University of Virginia, letters from Lazear to his mother, a Baltimore Sun article dated September 9, 1905, and Aristides Agramonte’s The Inside History of a Great Medical Discovery.
Lazear’s quote that Walter Reed was another convert of the mosquito theory was found in Hench’s interview with Reed’s children, as well as Hench’s questionnaire for Jefferson Kean