The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [74]
On August 27, Lazear finished his work at the lab at Las Animas Hospital in Havana and collected his glass tubes of mosquitoes to take with him to Camp Columbia. It was getting close to noon, the rooms of Las Animas grew stale, and the sun beat down against the tile floor. If he didn’t hurry, the afternoon rain would set in during their ride back to camp. Lazear didn’t want to take the time to return his glass-caged insects to Agramonte’s lab at the military hospital, so he carefully packed up the test tubes in a carrying case to take with him. Cuban doctors watched with curious amusement as Lazear came and went, his arms full of caged mosquitoes, just as Finlay had done twenty years before. As he left the hospital, Lazear noticed that the mosquitoes seemed to be thriving—all but one that is. Lazear made a note that morning that one of the females, who had bitten a new yellow fever patient twelve days before, had refused to feed.
Lunch ended at the mess hall at Camp Columbia, though the afternoon breeze still carried the smell of food and coffee. Most of the men were heading to their bunks to nap through the rainy part of the day, but Lazear returned to the lab to check on the dying mosquito. Carroll was seated at his microscope. Light poured through windows and cracks of the wooden walls leaving a pattern of lines and squares throughout the lab like a giant white web. Lazear tapped the glass tube and watched the listless female mosquito. He complained to Carroll that she had refused to feed that morning and would likely die by the next day. Carroll rolled up his sleeve and volunteered his arm. Without much thought, Lazear held the glass tube against Carroll’s pale skin and waited for the lethargic insect to light on his arm. But the mosquito remained still, clinging to the glass wall. Exasperated, Lazear let go. Carroll took hold of the test tube and patiently held it in place until the mosquito fluttered downward onto his arm and inserted her proboscis like a needle easing into flesh.
At that point, the board had all but given up its hopes of the mosquito as the transmitter of yellow fever. Half a dozen volunteers had fed infected mosquitoes, including Lazear on a number of occasions. Not a single case of yellow fever had developed. Carroll had been skeptical from the start, and by then, believed that the mosquito theory was useless. James Carroll was just feeding one of Lazear’s pet mosquitoes to keep it alive; he never expected to get ill.
Two days later, Carroll, Lazear and Agramonte worked in the one-story Las Animas Hospital in Havana. Lazear’s sickly mosquito was robust and healthy again thanks to her blood meal from Carroll. Lazear went about his usual, careful routine of feeding his mosquitoes on the infected patients in the yellow fever ward, plugging the test tubes with cotton and making marks in his leather logbook. Instead of taking the train along the Marianao railroad that afternoon, the three doctors left the hospital by Doherty wagon. When they came to the fork in the road, Agramonte hopped down and headed toward the military hospital on foot; Carroll and Lazear continued the ride along the sun-washed road to Camp Columbia. Carroll seemed quiet and distracted.
The next day, on August 30, Carroll and a few of the officers swam in the bright water off the coast of Cuba; sea bathing had become a favorite pastime. The water, as warm as the air, created a strange, seamless sensation as one stepped from the beach into the sea. As Carroll glided through the water, looking toward the shore where the wide leaves of palms flapped in the breeze, he felt an unusual chill. He eased toward the shallow water and waded ashore. The sun had given him a piercing headache as if every ray of light drove a nail into his skull. One of the contract surgeons took one look at the ashen-colored man staggering out of the sea and said, “yellow fever.” “Don’t be a damned fool—I have no such thing,” Carroll grumbled.
News that Carroll showed symptoms reached Lazear at the camp.