The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [76]
Warner continued to nurse Carroll, relying on many of the same techniques used over twenty years before in Memphis—the patient was kept very quiet, no food or solids could be given, only small sips of water or lemonade. Cold saline enemas were administered. Though acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin, had just been created at Germany’s Bayer company, the loose powder was not yet in general use for fevers.
In the medical chart, Warner recorded his temperature and pulse every three hours and sent urine samples to the lab twice a day. Carroll’s health continued to decline, and his wife received a daily telegram reporting the condition of her husband. His fever hovered around 104 degrees, his skin reddened by the heat; but for visitors, the most disturbing part was watching his body writhe and lurch in the bed.
Reed was finally notified by telegram as to what was happening in Cuba during his absence. He immediately wrote to Kean: “I cannot begin to describe my mental distress and depression over this most unfortunate turn of affairs. We had all determined to experiment on ourselves and I should have taken the same dose had I been there.”
After a week of delirium and high fever, Carroll’s temperature seemed to subside though his eyes remained saffron yellow. His wife received a telegram that day: Carroll out of danger. He had shown none of the telltale black vomiting, and the doctors felt confident that he would eventually recover. When Reed heard the news, he telegrammed Carroll.
September 7, 1900
1:15 P.M.
My Dear Carroll:
Hip! Hip! Hurrah! God be praised for the news from Cuba today— “Carroll much improved—Prognosis very good!” I shall simply go out and get boiling drunk!
Really I can never recall such a sense of relief in all my life, as the news of your recovery gives me! Further, too, would you believe it? The Typhoid Report is on its way to the Upper Office. Well, I’m damned if I don’t get drunk twice!
God bless you, my boy.
Affectionately,
Reed
Come home as soon as you can and see your wife and babies.
Reed sealed the letter, but before he sent it, he flipped the envelope over and scrawled in his large, curled handwriting, onto the back: “Did the Mosquito DO IT?”
With Carroll on the mend, and Dean recovering from his case of yellow fever, the board decided to stop any further experiments. As Agramonte, whose immunity could not be guaranteed, described it, “We felt that we had been called upon to accomplish such work as did not justify our taking risks which then seemed really unnecessary.” Besides, with one colleague down and Reed still in the U.S., the Yellow Fever Board couldn’t afford to lose another member now that they had their first real break in solving a disease that had plagued people for centuries.
One member of the board did not heed the warning.
Lazear wrote to his wife, Mabel, from the Columbia Barracks on September 8, “I rather think I am on the track of the real germ, but nothing must be said as yet . . . I have not mentioned it to a soul.”
The events that followed and the resulting tragedy would be debated for the next five decades.
CHAPTER 17
Guinea Pig No. 1
On September 13, Jesse Lazear sat in the yellow fever ward of the Las Animas hospital in Havana pressing a glass test tube against the abdomen of a bedridden soldier. The patient’s skin was the color of smeared iodine, and his body burned from the fever lit within. Dark, wooden shutters were open, and sunlight streamed across the Spanish tile floor of the hospital room as Lazear held the tube steady and waited for one of his “birds” to take a blood meal from the sick patient. Aedes aegypti are particularly sensitive to movement and will flutter away at the slightest twitch. As a vector, it makes the mosquito all the more deadly as during this