The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [63]
On May 21, the same day that Jefferson Kean had recorded the first two cases of yellow fever in Quemados, Surgeon General Sternberg had put in a request in Washington, D.C., to form a board to examine yellow fever. Though the directive would be to study “all infectious disease” afflicting the camps in Cuba, Sternberg made sure, verbally, that the focus would be yellow fever.
Sternberg had assigned Walter Reed and James Carroll to probe the finding of Dr. Sanarelli, an Italian bacteriologist who claimed to have found the microbe that caused yellow fever. For almost a decade after the congressional committee’s conclusion that bacteria caused yellow fever, medical theories and experiments on the subject of the disease stagnated until, on July 3, 1897, the British Medical Journal published an article about Dr. Giuseppe Sanarelli’s discovery of Bacillus icteroides: the bacteria that caused yellow fever. Sternberg’s pride had been wounded. Sternberg had missed his opportunity for fame with diseases like tuberculosis, pneumonia and malaria. A skilled microbe hunter, he had a personal passion to find and solve the yellow fever question, and after Sanarelli made some caustic remarks about a germ Sternberg had discovered, it became a battle of the egos. It also became another clash between the U.S. Army Medical Corps and the Marine Hospital Service. Sternberg was surgeon general of the Army Medical Corps while the Marine Hospital Service backed Sanarelli. The confrontation would continue for years.
A fresh outbreak of yellow fever in Havana and nearby camps provided Sternberg with the opportunity to test Sanarelli’s new bacteria. He asked Reed to investigate it, and soon thereafter, to head the Yellow Fever Board. Though Sternberg would later take credit for recommending the three other members of the board, it seems more likely that Reed himself chose or at least suggested them. After his return from Cuba in April, Reed had submitted his report on electrozone to Surgeon General Sternberg, ending with, “In carrying out the experimental part of this report, I desire to state that I have received valuable aid from Acting Assistant Surgeons A. Agramonte, Jesse Lazear, and James Carroll, U.S. Army.” Appointment to the board would forever change the lives of the four doctors.
First choice and second in command was James Carroll, Reed’s longtime assistant. Carroll was by far the most eccentric of the group. The men called him “Sunny Jim” because of his bald head. Born in England in 1854 to a working-class family, his background was a hodgepodge of professions. Originally, he planned to enter the British Army as an engineering student; instead, he was a self-described “wandering good-for-nothing who fell in love at fourteen and left home at fifteen, roughed it in the Canadian backwoods for several years and finally drifted into the Army.”
After his love affair at age fourteen ended in heartbreak, he abandoned his plans for army life and emigrated to Canada where he worked at one time or another as a blacksmith’s helper, a railroad laborer and a cordwood chopper. In 1874, he moved to the U.S. and joined the army as an enlisted man, a distinction that would color the remainder of his career and his ego. He would serve twenty-four years before wearing the uniform of an officer.
It was in the army that Carroll decided to pursue medicine. His was not a conventional background for medical school—he had no advanced degrees, he had taken one year of French and two