The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [71]
Albert Truby boarded the Rawlins late that night with the rowdy group of homeward-bound soldiers from the café. He made his way through the drunken shouts and cheers to his stateroom, where he was surprised to find Walter Reed on the lower bunk. In all the confusion, the only two medical officers on board had been given one room until separate quarters could be assigned.
As the lights in their cabin went out that night, Reed asked, “Doctor, were you mixed up in the celebration?” Truby dutifully explained that he had been at the quarantine station all day, but secretly, he was flattered by Reed’s concern. “He had always shown some interest in me since my entrance examination,” Truby would later write.
During the few days at sea, Reed and Truby discussed yellow fever. Reed was excited by the work the board had done examining the blood of yellow fever victims. Their findings, along with Agramonte’s independent blood cultures, had finally put an end to Sanarelli’s claims; Reed was satisfied that they’d finished that first, important objective, and he was anxious to see what Lazear had found in his insect work. Now, they could finally turn their attention to the mosquito theory.
As the Rawlins made its way north, and the sea air cooled, Reed talked to Truby openly and excitedly about the work on yellow fever. Duty done, he looked forward to returning to Cuba as soon as possible to launch the investigative portion of their study—his real passion. “He was much pleased,” wrote Truby, “with the deep interest Lazear was showing in the mosquito work.”
Yellow fever had been arguably the most feared disease in America and the Caribbean for two centuries; a few more weeks could hardly make a difference.
CHAPTER 15
Vivisection
Giuseppe Sanarelli’s paper on yellow fever had done more than spark a public brawl with Surgeon General Sternberg over the cause of the fever; it spotlighted the protest against vivisection and human experimentation in the late nineteenth century. Sanarelli, bruised by skepticism from Sternberg and the Hopkins doctors, boldly countered that he had managed to produce yellow fever in five hospital patients. His attempt at “scientific murder” brought a firestorm of opposition from the antivivisectionists, as well as the John Hopkins doctors. Sir William Osler spoke out publicly: “To deliberately inject a poison of known high degree of virulency into a human being, unless you obtain that man’s sanction, is not ridiculous, it is criminal.”
Vivisection, literally to cut open or dissect a living organism, was an umbrella term that not only applied to surgery and autopsy, but all medical experiments—those on animals, as well as humans.
In the late Victorian age, amid macabre tales of Jack the Ripper dissecting his victims and medical students robbing graves to find cadavers for autopsy study, the antivivisection activists rallied behind their cause—to place limitations on the physicians and scientists assuming a Godlike power over the human body, whether it is alive or dead.
As with most causes, the extremes dominated the argument. Antivivisectionists often quoted Alfred Lord Tennyson whose poem “In the Children’s Hospital” described the surgeon, with his ghastly tools, who “was happier using the knife than in trying to save the limb.” Scientists countered that no advances in medicine could be made without surgery, autopsy and experimentation.