The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [68]
One contract surgeon described Reed: “He was smart and knew about everything, but he was a man to whom you had to prove what you said . . . he was domineering . . . a good friend, but he insisted upon you being worthy of his friendship.”
Reed was not the only one growing impatient with the sleepy pace of work at Camp Columbia. Lazear wrote to his wife that the Quemados epidemic was over, but he would at least now have the opportunity to focus on some of his work with mosquitoes. Since he had been assigned to explore the mosquito theory, Lazear had a lot of time to work independently, traveling back and forth to Havana, where yellow fever outbreaks persisted. Lazear was also sent by Doherty wagon into the countryside whenever outbreaks occurred. He continued adding to his collection, taking the insects from inside the netting around hospital cots, caging them and returning to the lab at Camp Columbia.
Lazear also sounded homesick in his letters home—it had been three months since Mabel and Houston sailed for the U.S. He worried about how little Houston would react to his father after not seeing him for months. Mabel was suffering complications with the pregnancy and had already been admitted to the hospital for the final weeks. Lazear began to talk about what sort of work he might pursue in Washington once his service was over. He was having his mother’s portrait painted and looked forward to the day he would have a permanent home in which to hang it. Lazear was very close to his mother. Twice widowed, his mother had also lost both of Lazear’s brothers. Jesse Lazear was all she had left. He began to make plans to sail home for a visit in October.
Reed sat at his desk one afternoon in July to write to Emilie. A photo of their daughter Blossom was propped up before him. Reed had just returned from Havana, chased back to the barracks by a heavy storm settling in for the afternoon. In Havana, Reed had seen his son, Lawrence, also stationed in Cuba, and he wrote Emilie to tell her about their meeting. Lawrence looked cool and collected, wrote Reed, with a helmet perched on his head. Army life suited Lawrence far more that academics did, and Reed was proud to see his son come into his own. At their home in Washington, Reed had noticed his son’s lack of interest in studies and reproached him, refusing to send him to college. Lawrence Reed would not disappoint his father; by the end of his forty-two years in the army, Lawrence would become a major general.
In Havana, Lawrence told his father that he had just bought a khaki suit and a linen crash one for the warm weather. Reed told him to buy a second crash suit, and he would foot the bill. Lawrence smiled. “I will not neglect to do so.”
The only real excitement the board had thus far was a visit from two English doctors, Dr. Herbert Durham and Dr. Walter Myers, who were part of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Reed wrote to Emilie: “I enjoyed meeting them very much, as they were two of the most typical English men, ‘don’t you know,’ that one could possibly meet. We have placed our laboratories at their disposal during the ten days they will be in Havana.” The doctors also met Dr. Henry Rose Carter, an American doctor from the South who had made some interesting observations about the incubationperiod of yellow fever, most notably the five-to-seven-day time span between the first cases of yellow fever and the next wave of infections. And the doctors spent some time with Dr. Carlos Finlay in Havana as well.
The British doctors, like the American Yellow Fever Board, were intrigued by the idea that yellow fever might be spread by an insect. They later published an article in which they thanked the Americans for their hospitality in Cuba. In it, Durham and Myers wrote, “The suggestion propounded by Dr. C. Finlay, of Havana, some twenty years ago, that the disease was spread by means of mosquitoes hardly appears so fanciful in the light of recent discoveries.” Six months later, both Durham