The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [128]
Reed’s reference to human experimentation came from his July 24th letter to Sternberg.
The story of Reed’s return trip to the United States was taken from Truby’s account—including Reed’s joke about the “Rollins.”
Vivisection
The best book I’ve found on vivisection and the source for much of this chapter is Susan Lederer’s Subjected to Science. I also consultedLawrence Altman’s Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine.
Information about Edward Jenner’s experiments on his son was taken from Greer Williams’s Virus Hunters.
The study that George Sternberg and Walter Reed conducted on children in orphanages was published in 1895 in Transactions of the Association of American Physicians as “Report on Immunity against Vaccination Conferred upon the Monkey by Use of the Serum of the Vaccinated Calf and Monkey.”
The Tennyson quote comes from his poem “In the Children’s Hospital,” published in The Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson. The reference to the poem was found in Lederer’s book.
Did the Mosquito Do It?
The dates surrounding the time the board first visited Carlos Finlay were kept purposely vague. Some accounts claim that the Yellow Fever Board first visited Finlay in early July, just after their arrival. Other accounts say it didn’t happen until early August. There is no definitive proof either way.
Much of the details surrounding Carroll’s infection came from Agramonte’s account, as well as Philip S. Hench’s speech “The Conquest of Yellow Fever,” written on January 1, 1955. I also found details about the illness that Lazear wrote in his logbook, now held at the New York Academy of Medicine.
Lazear’s mention of trying to find the real yellow fever germ rather than bothering with Sanarelli came from a letter written to wife, Mabel, on August 23, 1900. His reference to the distance seeming very great at a time like this was found in a letter to his mother dated August 27, 1900. Both letters are held in the Hench collection.
Carroll’s impression of the mosquito hypothesis—that it was useless—come from his own words in a letter to an editor on June 26, 1903.
I pieced together the scene of Carroll’s first symptoms of the illness from a few different sources. The description of sea bathing came from a letter that Lazear wrote to his mother on September 18, 1900, describing the water as feeling as warm as the air. Dr. William Bean’s book, Walter Reed, also offers Alva Sherman Pinto’s recollection of that afternoon.
The details about Carroll’s illness were taken from Agramonte’s account, Lena Warner’s personal account of nursing Carroll and Howard A. Kelly’s book.
The scene in which William E. Dean is infected has been debated over the years. In some accounts, including a popular play called Yellow Jack, Dean was infected knowingly or unknowingly while he was bedridden and recovering in Las Animas Hospital. For this book, I based the scene on Agramonte’s own account, as he was one of the four members of the board.
Reed’s letters to Kean during Carroll’s illness, as well as his letter to Carroll on September 7, 1900, are held in the Hench collection.
Lazear’s letter to his wife, Mabel, was written on September 8, 1900, and is held in the Hench collection. I refer to the debate over the resulting tragedy as one that continued through the next five decades because a number of historians and participants attempted to explain what happened. Philip S. Hench was still piecing the story together in the 1940s and 1950s—five decades after the incident.
Guinea Pig No. 1
The description of the hospital room at Las Animas is based on a photograph held in the Hench collection. For a time, that room was marked with a plaque in honor of Jesse Lazear. The