The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [81]
There was urgency to the matter: The American Public Health Association would hold its annual meeting on October 23 in Indianapolis. Reed had already cabled Washington to ask permission to attend, and Sternberg, ever anxious to report the cause of yellow fever, had made space among the 150 delegates for Walter Reed. It was such a last-minute entry, however, that Reed’s name would never even appear in the printed program. Reed wrote to Emilie and told her to expect him by October 18, when he would travel to Indianapolis for the presentation of his paper, “The Etiology of Yellow Fever: A Preliminary Note.”
Reed had been given twenty minutes to speak, but was then granted an additional twenty for his presentation. He was explicit in his credit to others involved in the discovery, most especially Dr. Carlos Finlay, the “Mosquito Man,” who had been ridiculed by both the Spanish and American press. Reed publicly thanked Finlay for supplying the mosquito eggs necessary to the experiments and cited several of his published articles. The Indianapolis Journal called Reed’s presentation “fascinating,” and the New York Times published an article in which one health officer praised Reed’s theory. “If the Finlay theory is true,” said the officer, “the sufferer from abroad can be made harmless at the cost of a few yards of mosquito netting. He may die himself, but he will not kill others and he will not interrupt the business of railways or steamboats.”
Reed had hoped to make some final changes to his study before it went to print, but Sternberg, probably anxious for the Sanarelli camp to read it, prematurely sent the article without Reed’s approval to the Philadelphia Medical Journal, where James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte and Jesse Lazear were all listed as contributing authors. In the article, Reed discounted Sanarelli and his supposed yellow fever bacteria, calling it merely a “secondary invader.” Instead, Reed explained, “The mosquito serves as the intermediate host for the parasite of yellow fever.”
Naturally, Reed’s article received some criticism, especially from those who believed Sanarelli’s germ theory. The Washington Post, in particular, was harsh in its opinion of the mosquito hypothesis. In one article, they referred to the Yellow Fever Board, “whoever they may be,” as putting forth a theory that is “the silliest beyond compare.” While the article seems unduly subjective considering the recent connections between malaria and mosquitoes, it also confirmed what Reed had felt all along: That his professional reputation was riding on only one experimentally produced case of yellow fever. Just before leaving Cuba for the Indianapolis presentation, Reed and Kean had met with General Wood to discuss what actions to take when he returned. Kean wrote that Reed stood before the general, “tall, slender, keen and emotional” and convinced Wood with his “earnest and persuasive eloquence of which he was a master” to use $10,000 to fund a camp for further mosquito experiments.
It would be called Camp Lazear.
Wild and uncultivated, a clearing of two acres stood angled steeply between sea and sun. The ground was far enough from highway travel to discourage wayward visitors, and it was well drained and windswept enough to deter unwanted mosquitoes. It was also an area that had never seen yellow fever.
Walter Reed had returned to Cuba on November 5, 1900, and in his absence, he had Agramonte search out a locale for Camp Lazear. Agramonte was the natural choice—he was the only board member present in Cuba at the time, and he had lived there the longest. The land belonged to an ancestral home, 150 years old, called Finca San Jose in Marianao, and it was owned by a friend of Agramonte’s. They would lease