The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [50]
“Major, do you want me to go on that transport?” Vaughan asked.
Without answering, the superior officer called to a captain, “Bring a stretcher with bearers and put Vaughan on the transport.” On the long journey home, Vaughan recovered fully from his bout with yellow fever.
Victor Vaughan arrived back in New York in August of 1898, where orders from Surgeon General Sternberg awaited him. He would be part of the Typhoid Commission to investigate disease rampant among the American camps, and the head of the board would be Major Walter Reed.
CHAPTER 11
An Unlikely Hero
Walter Reed wore immortality modestly. He had a moustache, long and ribbonlike, on an otherwise boyish face. He referred to his wife and daughter with gushing pet names and had a habit of rubbing his palms together when pleased about something. His favorite drink was mint julep, though he was a minister’s son who could recite Scripture flawlessly. His lanky build belied a posture spent crooked over a microscope. His narrow, gray eyes were earnest, his brow creased with age. He looked more like a physician than a soldier, which is probably how he liked it since he preferred the men under his command to call him doctor, rather than major. Still, Reed was the type of army man and physician always in uniform and always within code; throughout his life he would write the word duty with a capital D. His favorite poet was Sir Walter Scott, the poet of chivalry and honor. If any pride or egotism existed within him, it did so far beneath an exterior of humility—his brother Christopher once remarked about him that every modest man is not great, but it is equally true that every great man is modest.
That Walter Reed’s name would survive among the greatest names in medical history would certainly have come as a shock to him had he lived long enough to learn of it.
Reed was born September 13, 1851, in a small, milk-white cabin in Gloucester County, Virginia, to a Methodist minister named Lemuel Sutton Reed and a mother named Pharaba White Reed. The cabin was on loan to the family after the parsonage burned shortly before their arrival, so Pharaba gave birth to her youngest child in a two-room cabin cradled by an elm tree.
Both Lemuel and Pharaba came from colonial families out of North Carolina, their heritage rich in self-reliance, inventiveness and fairness, traits that were fast becoming the trademarks of American ingenuity and success. In this new world, there was no sense of entitlement or aristocracy; determination and hard work were the blueprints for achievement. Pharaba’s finest attributes surfaced in Reed, even at a young age. Aside from her fair hair and blue eyes, Reed inherited her intelligence, vivacity, sharp wit and a love of gardening. He would follow his mother around the garden, imitating her, as she pruned the cornflowers, roses and larkspur. It was a passionate hobby he carried with him during his nomadic years in the army.
As a “circuit rider,” Reed’s father moved every two years throughout Virginia, wherever Methodist churches were in need of a new minister. Ministers of small towns maintained a certain celebrity and power over parishioners, and with it came social responsibility. Towns would wait to see if the new minister would tolerate dancing, drinking. Would he be a strong speaker? Would his family set the right example? Receiving very little pay, ministers and their families relied heavily upon their philanthropic neighbors. Reed may not have taken so well to the evangelical lifestyle though; he would not officially join the Methodist Church until he was a teenager. He joined the day his mother died. And, years later, when his son, Lawrence, was in school, Reed was incensed to learn of a Methodist revival there: “I don’t approve of such things for Children,” he wrote. “My boy hasn’t done anything that he should be told that he is lost since and in danger of hell-fire.”
During the 1850s, Virginia breathed promise in her verdant landscape,