The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [72]
Human vivisection had a long history, and it would not come to an end until the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in 1972, but it was in its heyday in the late nineteenth century. As one writer observed, “The use of human beings to confirm that a microbe caused a particular disease or to demonstrate the mode of transmission was a harsh legacy of the germ theory of disease.” Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch had provided the techniques necessary for studying germs, which included isolating a bug, growing a culture and finally using the germ to generate disease in a healthy organism, most often a human. Physicians routinely infected themselves, their children, unknowing patients, as well as infants, criminals, the dying and the mentally impaired.
Children were often subjects for medical testing since they were essentially clean slates with little exposure to disease. Nearly a decade before Edward Jenner’s famous vaccination against smallpox, he infected his ten-month-old son with swinepox. When the infant became ill, he tested him with smallpox at least six times. Jenner’s son would remain a sickly and mentally impaired child who finally died at age twenty-one. For the rest of his life, Jenner could not discuss his son without crying. Nearly a century later, Surgeon General George Sternberg and Walter Reed, in 1895, also used children in several orphanages to test a smallpox vaccine. The fact that Sternberg and Reed certainly believed they controlled the experiments and were not putting the children at risk only furthered the idea that they, like God, could conjure disease and cures at will.
One of the notable examples of self-experimentation was that of William Halsted, who tested the anesthetic capabilities of cocaine on himself. He would continue his brilliant career at Johns Hopkins, but suffered a lifelong battle with addiction. George Sternberg had gone so far as to self-experiment with gonorrhea in the 1880s, though fortunately for his wife, he failed to produce a positive result. And even yellow fever had been the subject of self-experimentation in the past. Dr. Stubbins Ffirth, in 1802, attempted to prove the fever was not contagious by injecting himself with tainted blood and swallowing pills made of black vomit. By not understanding the incubation period of the virus, Ffirth unknowingly spared himself a case of yellow fever. Carlos Finlay had been trying since 1880 to prove his mosquito theory of yellow fever, infecting around ninety human subjects, including a group of Jesuit priests, with the blood of fever patients. All had proved unsuccessful.
History’s most famous case of vivisection was yet to come however. As the Yellow Fever Board agreed to self-experiment in the following months, they seemed to have little confidence in the studies. At the very least, they believed it would be a long process with at least a year or two of work ahead of them.
CHAPTER 16
Did the Mosquito Do It?
When the epidemic in Quemados ended, and Reed had sailed for the U.S., the doctors of the Yellow Fever Board found themselves without subjects to research. They decided to move their studies to Las Animas Hospital, literally “the Souls Hospital,” in Havana, where there existed a large number of yellow fever patients, but also Agramonte’s fully equipped laboratory. The doctors settled into a quiet pattern: Agramonte performed autopsies on the yellow fever cadavers in Havana, Carroll continued his work with tissue samples in his lab at Camp Columbia, and Lazear nurtured his mosquitoes.
To Dr. Carlos