The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [55]
In 1893, a new surgeon general was selected: George M. Sternberg. Like Reed, Sternberg had been serving on the frontier, but more than simply treating disease, he was studying it, creating labs on dusty frontier outposts. Sternberg was not just an army man; he was a scientist. “The fossil age has passed,” wrote Reed.
Sternberg opened a new Army Medical School in Washington, D.C. Reed was promoted to the rank of major and asked to join the faculty, as well as serve as the curator of the Army Medical Museum, a position recently vacated by John Shaw Billings. Reed and his assistant, James Carroll, taught bacteriology, while continuing their lab work, shuttling back and forth between Baltimore and Washington. Knowledge unfurled before them; new studies and papers appeared almost faster than they could keep up.
Reed had worked among the filth in America’s largest city. He watched epidemics of infectious disease consume entire communities. He had labored in frontier camps and on army bases, observing the conditions of soldiers, their habits of hygiene. In his research, he quickly moved beyond simply identifying disease toward understanding ways to prevent it. Reed’s work as both a practicing physician on the frontier and a scientist at the center of the latest theories made him uniquely qualified for investigative medicine.
Surgeon General George Sternberg’s first commission for Walter Reed came during the Spanish-American War—war had a way of bringing science and soldiers together. Reed was to join Victor Vaughan and Edward Shakespeare in a study of typhoid. In spite of the fact that Sternberg was a staunch believer in sanitary practices, the army had been slow to act, and the surgeon general was now under heavy criticism for it. Thousands of soldiers crowded together in filthy camps waiting for orders; filth was expected in foreign camps, but it was scandalous that camps on American soil were in such poor shape. Ninety percent of the regiments reportedly contained cases of typhoid where the disease had been known to infect as many as one in four soldiers. “The government,” one newspaper column read, “may well consider the propriety of ordering all the troops at that point to Cuba or Puerto Rico for the improvement of their health.” When Reed’s Typhoid Board arrived at Camp Alger in Virginia, they found that the hospital barracks had no microscope. No autopsies had been performed. The camp doctors routinely confused cases of typhoid for malaria. But worst of all, the camp was filthy.
When the commission visited another camp to inspect sanitary conditions, the colonel gave them a tour of the grounds, which were foul. Reed turned to the colonel and said, “Shakespeare and Vaughan are on this commission because they know something of camp sanitation. I am here because I can damn a colonel.” Then, he lectured the officer on the responsibility an officer has to enforce good sanitation and health among his troops.
The worst camp they visited was Chickamauga Park on the border of Tennessee and Georgia; it was the largest camp in the country, and its name literally means “River of Death.” When the commission first arrived, the better part of 60,000 troops had just moved out, and piles of human excrement littered the ground at every step, soaking into the soil and water supply.
The common element in all of the camps was poor sanitation. The commission studied the conditions at all of the camps, plotting the arrival and departure of new troops, the supply of water, the food prepared in the mess hall and the orderlies who would empty bedpans, then eat lunch without washing their hands. The board sprinkled lime on the latrines and then watched as the same flies landed on food in the mess hall, their fine-haired legs tinged with the disinfectant. Finally, the commission put all of the pieces together.
Typhoid, the commission showed, was not only infectious, but also contagious. It seeped into the water supply through poor sanitation and spread among the troops through poor hygiene. Departing regiments left