The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [129]
The scene in this hospital room is a re-creation from Agramonte’s The Inside History of a Great Medical Discovery. This was the story Jesse Lazear adamantly told colleagues—he never wavered from this account. His colleagues agreed that the story did not seem reasonable—Lazear would have known exactly what kind of mosquito landed on his arm, and he was far too meticulous to have let it go at that. Reed, Agramonte and Carroll all believed Lazear himself was the “Guinea Pig” in his logbook. Nonetheless, they assumed Lazear had his reasons for not telling the truth— reasons that even today are a mystery—so they kept to the story Lazear himself had told just before he died.
All information and recordings from the logbook were taken from the book itself on my visit to the New York Academy of Medicine.
Details about how Lazear spent his time—sea bathing and reading each night before bed—came from a letter he wrote to his mother on September 18, 1900. The quote about how much he missed Houston is also taken from that letter.
Lazear’s complaint about feeling “out of sorts” came from Agramonte’s account, and the description of how Lazear spent that first night with yellow fever—organizing his notes—was taken from Truby’s Memoir of Walter Reed. In that book, Truby also describes the following morning when Lazear was taken by litter out of his home and moved into the yellow fever ward.
There are several references in Truby’s writings and Gustav Lambert’s account to Lena Warner nursing both James Carroll and Jesse Lazear. Warner’s own account is full of inaccuracies, even untruths. Whenever taking facts directly from her account, I was sure to find a second or third source to back up her claims. I used creative license in the section where Warner remembers her own case of yellow fever. Her writings refer to how the incident stayed with her, so it seems natural to assume nursing fever patients took her back to that place and time.
The description of the record book required by the chief surgeon is based on my visit to the National Library of Medicine where the original record books can be found. All that is left of Jesse Lazear’s is his fever chart, which is part of the Hench collection.
James Carroll’s remark about being profoundly shaken by the sight of his friend came from his interview with Caroline Latimer, published in A Cyclopedia of American Medical Biography. Agramonte’s impression was found in his The Inside History of a Great Medical Discovery.
Walter Reed’s letter to Carroll was written on September 24, 1900, and Reed’s letter to Jefferson Randolph Kean was written on September 25, 1900. Both letters are held in the Hench collection.
The description of Lazear’s spiraling illness and eventual death were based on Lena Warner’s “Recollections of Lena A. Warner.” Similar details were taken from Gustav Lambert’s account, Truby’s memoir and Hench’s research. His fever chart shows his temperature falling from 104 to 99 degrees, where it flatlined. In trying to do justice to Lazear’s horrible death, I relied wholly on facts recorded by others—his running madly around the room destroying things and the vomit roiling over the bar. In that instance, it is not bars of the cot but the mosquito bar and netting hanging over the hospital bed. The only point when I added a detail not explicitly described firsthand was in restraining Lazear. Warner recalled two soldiers having to hold him down and restrain him, but there is no record of how they restrained him. In this account, I presumed they tied his wrists and ankles.
A copy of Jesse Lazear’s death certificate can be found in the Hench collection, and the original is at the National Library of Medicine. The account of his burial was based on Truby’s description. There have been discrepancies about whether or not James Carroll was present at the funeral. Reed was in the United States, and Agramonte had just been sent there on orders from General Wood (copies of those orders are in the Hench collection).