The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [58]
Reed stayed in a new bungalow flanked by a wide veranda on each side. The building served as quarters for bachelor medical officers. Its clapboard frame shored up a large tile rooftop that draped over the edges of the wide porches where rain would soon fall in fixed streams. Shutters on every wall allowed for a breeze-way, and in some of the nicer buildings the windows were made of glass. In many, however, there were only the wooden shutters to close against the rain. It was on this veranda that Reed and the other doctors stationed at Camp Columbia sat in their army whites and listened as the band’s music drifted in the approaching dusk. The insects were not yet prolific, but soon, as the wet season approached, the hum of mosquitoes would hang on the melody of the nighttime music.
Albert Truby stood on the porch with Reed, as did two other contract surgeons. Reed’s good friend Jefferson Randolph Kean, chief surgeon of western Cuba, was also there, as was Dr. Aristides Agramonte, an American doctor of Cuban descent. Agramonte had worked with Reed in Washington before being sent to Havana.
Another doctor sat on the veranda that night. Though he looked younger than the other men, he was an assistant surgeon for the army and the resident bacteriologist who headed the camp’s lab. Just a few months before, Albert Truby had put in a request to Major Kean for a full-time bacteriologist to head the lab at Camp Columbia, and the army appointed Jesse Lazear.
Dr. Jesse Lazear was from the East, born and raised near Baltimore at Windsor, the estate of his grandfather. He had a close-cropped beard and black hair offset by blue eyes. He rarely spoke and asked questions even less. Lazear was well liked by everyone, even described as lovable by a number of the men. Agramonte, who had been a fellow classmate at Columbia, would later write of Lazear, “A thorough university man, he was the type of old southern gentleman, kind, affectionate, dignified, with a high sense of honor, a staunch friend and a faithful soldier.” The word most often used in reference to him was gentleman, and in that age of moral high-mindedness, manners and codes of conduct, it was the greatest compliment one could bestow. Jesse Lazear was the type of man who wrote to his mother every day and loved Cuba because he didn’t have to play golf.
At only thirty-four years of age, he was highly accomplished, and often, more qualified than medical officers who outranked him. Lazear attended Washington and Jefferson College, graduated from medical school at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York, as well as Johns Hopkins University. Soon after graduating, he left for Europe to study with the greatest minds in science at the Pasteur Institute. His studies continued in Scotland, Germany and France, where he wanted to improve his language skills. As most groundbreaking scientific studies came out of Europe, they were usually in German or French, so Lazear wanted to read and understand them in their original language. When he sailed back to the States, he returned to Baltimore, where at the age of thirty, he became the first doctor in charge of a clinical lab at Johns Hopkins.
While Lazear was a physician who would be talented in any number of fields, lab work was particularly suited to his ability. He was gifted with perception, a sort of insight for the way things work, and he was meticulous. His thick glass slides, smeared with blood, were kept in perfect order in a wooden box alongside a leather logbook for notations. Next to the slides sat his microscope, which resembled a spyglass. It was his attention to detail, his obsession with accuracy, which would prove to be the haunting mystery left in Cuba long after the doctors departed the island.
As Lazear