The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [85]
The board justified their means by arguing that Spanish immigrants in Cuba routinely expected to suffer a case of yellow fever—they would at least be paid for it this way. As crude as their methods seem to modern science, this was still during the height of vivisection. After all, two of the board members had infected themselves in the course of the last few months. What would make this experiment different, and set a precedent for all future human experiments, was the consent form. Most human experiments in the past had been conducted on unsuspecting patients or under false pretenses. Walter Reed insisted that these volunteers understand fully what they were risking and be compensated for it. Years later, Major Randolph Kean would proudly hang a copy of the bilingual consent form on his office wall.
Once the consent form was signed, Moran and the Spanish volunteers went into isolation on November 20. Kissinger, who had been on the premises for a full month, did not need to be quarantined and was ready to begin the experiments immediately. Just as Lazear had done two months before, Reed set a glass tube against Kissinger’s skin and allowed the loaded mosquito to land and bite. Now, they would wait to see if and when Kissinger might develop the fever.
Kissinger earned a sort of hero status around the camp. When he entered the mess hall one day, the soldiers rose from their seats and shouted, “Attention! Hero Kissinger is here!” They continued with the meal, occasionally asking someone to “Pass the hero the butter” or “Pass our hero the pickles.” One of the soldiers later wrote that Kissinger “was blushing a rosy red, and was so embarrassed he couldn’t eat. For he knew that this was the Army Way of hiding the real sentiment we all felt by making a joke of our deep appreciation we would not express in words.”
The days seemed slow going, the experiments uneventful. The men were not allowed to leave the isolated farm, and instead played poker and performed light duties around Camp Lazear, adhering to the old army saying, “If it’s there, pick it up; if you can’t move it, paint it; if it moves, salute it!”
Moran continued to work as a clerk, this time for Reed. He spent four or five hours a day typing reports—with his two index fingers only—on the army’s standard Hammond typewriter. A perfectionist, Moran was even known to retype whole pages if he found an erase mark. Reed once tore up a whole page on yellow fever when he found an error, telling Moran that “perfection is next to impossible on a machine.”
By the end of November, Kissinger, Moran and the other volunteers had all been bitten at one time or another, sometimes even twice, but there was not a single case of yellow fever among them. What the virus accomplished in nature with relative ease proved much more complicated in the lab. Like Finlay before them, their mistake lay in the simple matter of timing, and as one historian put it, their harvest would soon ripen with a vengeance.
On December 5, Kissinger volunteered to be bitten for the third time, this time by five different mosquitoes. At least one of the loaded insects in the group had fed on a yellow fever patient in the first three days of fever. The virus slipped