The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [52]
Reed studied for nine months, taking courses in anatomy, chemistry, pharmacy, surgery, among others, and slept only three or four hours a night. At the end of the term, he passed the examination, and the board kept their promise. Walter Reed remains the youngest graduate of the University of Virginia’s medical school—he was seventeen years old.
Following his graduation, Walter Reed moved to Brooklyn with his brother, Christopher, an attorney who wanted to practice law in New York where he would never run out of clients. For Reed, New York represented the best in medicine—its hospitals highly regarded and its many citizens in need of help. It was not, however,an easy choice for either brother to make as southerners. A mere four years since a war still bitterly fresh in the minds of both sides, the North felt like enemy territory.
Reed earned his second medical degree from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the premier teaching hospital at the time. Because he was only eighteen years old, Bellevue withheld his degree until he was twenty-one. At Bellevue, Reed had his first opportunity to use a microscope, as well as a thermometer—measuring ten inches long and taking five minutes for a reading. Medical studies at that time were still very crude. Cadavers were not preserved well, so doctors often kept handkerchiefs over their mouths while working. The stethoscope had been around for only fifty years. Disease prevention was unheard of. Links between sanitation and illness had not yet been realized.
Reed continued to practice medicine in Brooklyn and New York, as well as serving on the Brooklyn Board of Health as a sanitary officer. New York City teemed with immigrants after the Civil War. For the first time, Reed met Italians, Irish, Asians, Germans. With the mass immigration came new epidemics, which spread rapidly among the conditions of filth and poor nutrition in the city. Reed was assigned as district physician to the poorest district in New York. Many of his patients included the destitute “squatters” who lived in colonies in Central Park.
Growing up in Virginia, Reed lived mostly among farms, his family dependent upon the goodwill of parishioners for extra provisions. Neighbors helped one another. Never had he seen real urban poverty and the self-serving individualism that accompanied it. He was appalled by the unsanitary living conditions and poor medical attention given to lower classes in the cities. His anguish over their pitiable circumstances and the epidemics that routinely rained over the communities planted in him a desire—and later an obsession—to do something toward the improvement of humanity. In order to wage such a war, you have to identify the enemy, and Reed found his: disease, filth and poverty.
One night he returned home to the apartment he shared with Christopher. Walter Reed stood for a long time at the dark window, his silhouette backlit by gas lamps. He thought his brother was sleeping as he stared out the black glass and said quietly: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida, for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sion, they would long ago have repented in sackcloth and ashes.” The brothers never spoke of it; as Christopher later explained, “There are some things too sacred for the invasion of words.”
On a trip to North Carolina where his family now lived, Reed met his wife, Emilie Lawrence, the daughter of a prominent planter. Emilie, who changed the spelling from Emily to be more elegant, was pretty, though not conventionally beautiful. She had a long, straight nose, honey-colored hair and lean lips. Reed wrote of Emilie’s “beauty of character, your womanly worth, the purity of your Christianity, the charm of your intellect.”
“Should you spurn my affection,” he wrote to her, “I should never be ashamed of having revealed my love to so noble a woman.”
It was upon meeting Emilie that Reed’s work in New York lost its luster once and for all. He wrote to her that if