The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [56]
With new sanitation measures in place, the surgeon general had great hopes for eliminating not only typhoid but other diseases as well—especially yellow fever. The Spanish-American War had ended, but troops remained, occupying Cuba and dying of disease. Though typhoid and dysentery had proven to be most disastrous, yellow fever was the most feared. The haunting stigma surrounding the American plague remained. Soldiers who had never even seen it feared it above all others; stories of the 1878 epidemic still circulated. “Medical men for centuries had been working in the dark, not knowing what to fight. That fact alone made yellow fever the most fearful of all diseases,” wrote one army doctor.
Sternberg’s hopes perished with the onset of another yellow fever epidemic in Havana in 1900.
Cleaning up the camps had done nothing to slow the spread of yellow fever. Two hundred years of scourges and two decades of Surgeon General Sternberg’s personal study had yielded no definitive answers about the disease. So Sternberg handpicked a frontier physician who had shown remarkable promise in the lab and swift success with typhoid. Sternberg had a special assignment in mind for Reed, and he would soon report to a camp just outside of Havana called Camp Columbia.
Victor Vaughan and Edward Shakespeare would be left on their own to finish the typhoid report. Vaughan would hardly fade behind the fame of Walter Reed. His career had only begun— Victor Vaughan became one of the heroes in the fight against the 1918 influenza pandemic, and one historian would call him “second only to Welch in his influence on American medical education.” Still, Vaughan would also learn a valuable lesson, one that many other doctors failed to realize. “Never again allow me to say that medical science is on the verge of conquering disease,” he later said.
CHAPTER 12
A Meeting of Minds
Everything about Camp Columbia was vivid. The colors were bold: bright blue sky, yellow heat, the flat swath of green, the clapboard buildings standing row after row like game pieces carved from bone. Though several miles from shore, the white light of the camp was suffused with salt and sea wind. The scent of overripened pineapples in nearby fields sugared the air, but beneath the sweetness, the chemicals were pungent. The smell of disinfectants, iodine and alcohol crossed the breeze. The landscape appeared vast, unbroken, except for the shadeless royal palms with their gray trunks standing like granite columns among the buildings. At the northeastern point of the camp, the Gulf of Mexico stretched in staggered shades of blue. The weather existed in extremes as well with only two seasons: wet or dry.
Camp Columbia’s focus was the care and treatment of sick soldiers. Three hospital buildings stood on stilts of varying heights that leveled the walking porches connecting them, and walkways of white limestone led to the main entrance. One housed a convalescent ward. Another held a small restroom and bathing rooms connected by a large iron pipe to funnel in heated water. There was also a surgical ward with eighteen beds, an operating room and dressing rooms. And one ward, lined with thirty beds and fine mesh netting, held the typhoid and undiagnosed fever patients. Several hundred feet away, across the La Playa road and a footbridge, even past the railroad tracks on the outer edge of the Columbia Barracks, were eight small huts. They were the yellow fever wards.
The camp had been built on a high plain about six miles west of Havana near the town of Quemados, Marianao, and it housed 1,900 American soldiers—part of the 15,000 men and women left behind to occupy Cuba following the war. The