The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [83]
In modern times, it’s hard to understand the mentality that would lead a soldier into knowingly risking his life for the purpose of medicine. Soldiers are trained to fight and defend; if any illness befalls them, it’s considered a cruel and unjust turn of events. But prior to World War II and the introduction of penicillin, soldiers lost their lives to disease far more than bullets. From the time of the American Revolution through World War I, a soldier knew his odds of dying from dysentery, cholera, typhoid, smallpox, influenza or yellow fever were greater than those on the battlefield, so volunteering for human experiments might not seem as much of a psychological departure as it would today. After all, a soldier’s duty is to defense, and many men felt that the greatest threat to the American people lay not in enemy warships or troops, but in disease.
On the evening of November 30, Cooke and the two other men entered Reed’s carefully crafted building and sealed the solid wood door behind them. A single stove stood in the one-room house, and it kept the temperature inside somewhere between 90 and 100 degrees at all times. Impenetrable to light or air, the small room felt like a furnace. The three men began breaking open the crates and boxes left in the center of the room. As they opened the first trunk, the odor was so pungent that the men ran outdoors, hands over their mouths, to keep from retching. After a few minutes, the three men returned and finished unpacking boxes full of soiled sheets, covered in vomit, sweat and feces from the yellow fever ward. They dressed in the filthy clothing that had been worn by dying patients, they covered their cots in sheets stained with black vomit, and then they spent the next twenty nights the same way.
For the mosquito trials, Reed felt less certain about seeking volunteers. It was one thing to ask Cooke and the men to expose themselves to the filth Reed was certain could not transmit yellow fever; it was something else all together to ask men to volunteer for the same experiments that had killed Jesse Lazear and had almost taken James Carroll. The other doctors let it be known that Reed would need volunteers, and then they waited.
Many of the doctors at Camp Columbia knew of John Moran’s situation. Having been honorably discharged from the army that July, Moran worked as a civilian clerk, hoping to save up enough money for medical school. An Irishman who had planned to join the cavalry at the onset of the Spanish-American War, his interest had turned instead to the Hospital Corps. As one contract surgeon told him, “Moran, any man with enough influence can become a captain, but not a doctor.”
Moran was well liked, though considered a little green. When he first arrived in Cuba, the corpsmen made sure to teach the new Irishman some helpful Spanish phrases. “They were words,” he later wrote, “that I could not speak today in the presence of respectable, Spanish-speaking dames and expect to get away with it.”
Moran received around $100 a month for his work as a field clerk under General Fitzhugh Lee and had been allowed to remain at Camp Columbia in spite of his civilian status so that he could save money for school. On his discharge papers, his character was described as “excellent,” his services, “honest and faithful.”
Like many of the men at Camp Columbia, John Moran was also well acquainted with yellow jack. He arrived at work one morning to find the desk next to him empty, only to learn that the other clerk had just died of yellow fever. He had also heard the famous story of Major Peterson, which had shocked the military in Cuba