The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [131]
Other descriptions of the building came from Reed’s hand-drawn plans, Truby’s account and “Memorandum on Yellow Fever Experiments,” written by Robert P. Cooke in 1940. Additional details about the men’s experience inside the building came from Agramonte’s article.
The majority of information about John Moran, how he came to be one of the volunteers, his stay in the Infected Mosquito Building and his resulting illness came from his own unpublished autobiography Memoirs of a Human Guinea Pig, written at Hench’s request in 1937.
The story of Major Peterson was told in an account written by Kean on May 8, 1941, the Recollections of Lena A. Warner and Recollections of Personal Experiences in Connection with Yellow Fever by Chauncey Baker. All three sources can be found in the Hench collection.
Information about Roger Post Ames came from Moran’s account, as well as the account of Gustav Lambert, Ames’s nurse.
Lawrence Reed’s remark about the veracity of Reed’s famous statement to Moran and Kissinger came from an interview with Lawrence and Blossom Reed by Hench on November 21, 1946.
Reed’s written recommendation for John Moran was found in Moran’s My Date with Walter Reed and Yellow Jack. Both Reed and Moran were on the same transport back to the U.S. Reed approached Moran and gave him the recommendation, adding that he should have done it long before then.
The account of procuring the Spanish volunteers at the Immigration Station came from Agramonte. And the details about the consent form came from Bean’s book, Walter Reed.
The description of the experiments performed on John Kissinger came from his own account given to Hench, “Memorandum: Experiences with the Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba 1900, by John R. Kissinger.” The details about how the men responded to Kissinger as a hero from that point forward was found in an account written by Paul L. Tate on July 27, 1954, for Hench. Tate also provided the “old army saying.”
For the sake of pacing, I streamlined some of the details about the experiments in November, December and January. The facts are all there, but I chose not to outline every single experiment performed during that three-month period. To recreate the experiments, I relied on several different sources. Philip S. Hench provided a “Summary of Research,” written on August 20, 1940, which I used as a general guideline. I also relied on the personal accounts written by Kissinger, Moran and Truby. Other details came out in original letters: One was written by Hench to Truby, January 7, 1941, and the other was a letter Reed wrote to Truby on December 10, 1900. Reed’s quote about the importance of these discoveries came from his letter to Emilie on December 9, 1900. An excerpt of that letter was provided by Blossom Reed in her “Biographical Sketch,” written for Hench.
The rumors about the bleached bones of Walter Reed’s yellow fever volunteers came from Bean’s book, as well as a letter Reed wrote to Emilie.
In developing the scene where Walter Reed walks through the streets of Havana on his way to a banquet on December 22, 1900, I used personal experience, old photographs and Hench’s notes. It was December when I visited Havana, so I had the opportunity to see huge poinsettia bushes in bloom and Christmas decorations around the city. I visited Parque Central, the Hotel Inglaterra and the site of what used to be Old Delmonico’s. In Hotel Inglaterra, they have an old print of the area from 1904. From the sketch, I took details of the park as it appeared in 1900, as well as the Tacón theater, which is now the beautiful Gran Teatro. The building where the restaurant stood in 1900 is now abandoned, but I was still able to climb the staircase and study details about the architecture. Details about the banquet itself came from a speech given by Hench on December 3, 1952, entitled, “The Historic Role of the Finca San Jose and Camp Lazear in the