The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [75]
When Agramonte arrived at Camp Columbia the next morning, he found Carroll twisted over the microscope searching his own blood for the oblong shape of the malarial parasite. Carroll peered through the lens and tried to sound casual as he told him he caught a cold at the beach; but his bloodshot eyes and his pallid skin, beaded with perspiration, shocked Agramonte.
Carroll remained stubborn, finally having to be ordered to the hospital where his illness spiraled, and he soon became delirious. His temperature rose to 105 degrees, and his heart swelled under the pressure. James Carroll was forty-six years old, and yellow fever proved far more deadly in those over the age of forty.
Lena Warner was called in to nurse him. Warner, who as a child had the fever during the 1878 epidemic, knew exactly what Carroll was feeling. Weak and ill, he tried to tell her that he had been bitten by a mosquito before contracting the fever, but up to that point, it was still an unbelievable theory. His desperate attemptsto tell her what had happened were dismissed as fever-induced ravings, and Warner made notes on Carroll’s chart that he was delirious. She did, however, agree to Carroll’s pleas to go by the board’s laboratory on her rounds and drop a small bit of banana into the glass test tubes. Then, he gave very specific directions for replacing the cotton in the top of the tube to prevent the mosquito from escaping. Above all else, the insect was not to get out of its glass cage.
In the lab, Lazear and Agramonte continued to search smears of Carroll’s blood for parasites, or any substantial clue to the illness. Rain began to fall and would continue to deluge Cuba in the following days as a tropical storm settled over the mountains of Cuba gathering its dark energy. Lazear flipped through the pages of his notebook to the day that the mosquito had fed on Carroll’s arm. Since then, Carroll had visited the yellow fever wards at both Las Animas and Military Hospital No. 1, as well as an autopsy room that was so filthy Carroll refused to work until it was thoroughly disinfected. He had been exposed to yellow fever on several occasions, as he had every day over the last two months. As a case study, he was a decidedly poor one. The only way to prove that it was in fact the mosquito was to try the experiment again.
As Lazear stood in the lab with a test tube in each hand trying to coax a mosquito from one glass house to the other, a soldier walked by the doorway and saluted him. His hands full of test tubes and a stubborn insect, Lazear cheerfully answered, “Good morning,” instead of returning the salute. The soldier, curious and encouraged by Lazear’s approachable manner, stepped into the room.
“You still fooling with mosquitoes, Doctor?”
“Yes,” Lazear said, balancing the tubes, end to end, “will you take a bite?”
“Sure, I ain’t scared of ’em.” The soldier, like most others, found the work of the Yellow Fever Commission fairly amusing. The mosquito theory, just the thought that these tiny insects as frail and inconsequential as lint with wings could transmit illness, seemed ludicrous.
The soldier had never lived in the tropics before and had not left the base for two months; he was the ideal candidate. Agramonte came into the lab and scribbled the name onto a piece of paper: William E. Dean. He would also be known as patient XY. Several days later, Dean became the second known case of experimental yellow fever.
The moon had been brush-marked with clouds all night, and by early morning, as Dean’s fever climbed, red light rose like embers off the ocean water. The tropical storm that