The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [78]
Lazear was moved into the yellow fever ward at Camp Columbia, occupying the second to the last dwelling. There, Lena Warner nursed Jesse Lazear, recording his vitals. The surgeon general required a log of fever cases for army record. The book, maintained by the chief surgeon of the camp, detailed a patient’s name, regiment, nativity, age and medical history. There were physiological diagrams for a surgeon to draw exactly where a bullet might have entered and exited the body, and there was a full-page fever chart. Warner tracked Lazear’s temperature as it rose to 103 degrees, and his pulse hovered around eighty.
Carroll had gained enough strength to walk, though he remained very frail. He and Agramonte made their way through Camp Columbia, past the hospital buildings, across the tracks, down the row of one-room buildings that kept the yellow fever victims isolated as neatly as their jars caged the deadly vectors. Carroll was profoundly shaken by the sight of his colleague: “I shall never forget the expression of alarm in his eyes.” Lazear’s diaphragm was beginning to spasm, and he knew better than most that it meant the black vomit would soon begin. Agramonte would later write about the relief he felt when he finally saw his friend’s eyes grow blank, and Lazear’s mind lost hold of his wife, son and an infant daughter he had never met. Both doctors pressed Lazear for more information, but all he would say was that he had not experimented on himself. Instead, he told them a mosquito in the hospital landed on his arm, and he could not brush it away.
Reed received a cable with the news that Lazear had contracted yellow fever. He wrote to Carroll immediately: “Your letter of Sept. 20th has just been received, telling me of Lazear’s attack—I am now anxiously awaiting Maj. Kean’s next cable . . . I cannot but believe that Lazear will pull through. I hope & pray that he does come out alright.”
On September 25, Reed sent a letter to Kean: “I have been so ashamed of myself for being here in a safe country, while my associates have been coming down with Yellow Jack.” He also wrote: “I somehow feel that Lazear will pull through, as he is such a good, brave fellow.”
That same day, Lena Warner braced Lazear’s arms with all of her weight, shouting for help. Still, he bolted from the bed, darting around the small, frame-wood room as wildly as a trapped insect beating against glass. Two soldiers ran into the ward, pinning Lazear to the bed, tying restraints onto his wrists and ankles.
The Cuban sun beat down against the one-room shack, and Warner sponged his body with iced whiskey and water. She recorded his temperature, which had held at 104 degrees for days, on the chart beside his bed. His eyes were wild.
It was twilight; she could hear the music from the main hall and the drone of soldier’s voices in the distance. Inside the clapboard ward, the dim light and smell of death took Warner out of the camp in Cuba to another time, twenty years before, when she lay on the floor of a plantation house outside of Memphis surrounded by the corpses of her family. Her skin burned at the memory. Flies had swarmed around the bodies, and as always, there was the sound of mosquitoes, the hum of their wings flinching in the hot air.
Lena Warner heard Lazear’s restless stirring in the bed, felt the intimacy of watching someone sleep. But the quiet did not last. Lazear’s body began to lurch, and black vomit roiled from his mouth, through the bar hanging above his hospital cot. He writhed in the bed, and his skin grew deep yellow. His 104 temperature slowly fell, leveling out at 99 degrees, and Jesse Lazear died at 8:45 p.m. at the age of thirty-four.
His arm and leg restraints were removed, and Albert Truby signed the death certificate for the quartermaster: “I have the honor to inform you that Jesse W. Lazear, Acting Assistant Surgeon, U.S.A., died at this hospital at 8:45 pm, Septr 25, 1900.” For the diagnosis, he wrote “yellow fever.” For the immediate cause of death, Truby left the space blank; a diagnosis of yellow fever was explanation enough.