The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [87]
On Christmas Day, four days after he entered the Infected Mosquito Building, John Moran awoke with a headache and a chill. He had made a wager with a fellow soldier that he would be present at lunch, and being an Irishman, he wasn’t going to give up so easily. Moran knew that eating heavy amounts of food during a case of yellow fever could have disastrous results, so he picked at his Christmas lunch, trying to hide how little he ate.
“Guess you win,” admitted the soldier. “Damn it, you can’t kill an Irishman anyway.” The soldier reached into his pocket to retrieve the money.
Moran looked up from his plate, “Well, I guess you won and lost.”
The soldier’s smile faded, creases settling around his eyes and brow. “You don’t mean to tell me that you have it, Johnny?”
By 3:00 that afternoon, when Reed arrived, Moran’s temperature was 103. Reed stood before him with a broad smile. “Moran, this is one of the happiest days of my life.”
Moran’s temperature would continue to rise to 104 degrees, as he ate nothing but cracked ice and sipped strained watermelon juice for two weeks. During the course of his illness, he lost twenty pounds before making a full recovery.
Though they occupied the same building, ate the same food and breathed the same air as John Moran, the volunteers from the “safe side” of the building never came in contact with mosquitoes. Neither man ever contracted yellow fever.
In the week before Christmas, the atmosphere in Havana was festive, almost like a carnival. In spite of a toothache and no dentist available to treat it, Reed took part in the festivities. He walked the gaslit streets of Havana on the night of December 22, where porch fronts were studded with tropical flowers instead of evergreen boughs. Poinsettia bushes were in bloom, and candles lined windows and church doorways streaming wax down the stucco.
Son music was played in taverns and cafes, the sound of the guitar and flute rising in the air with the beat of maracas like shifting sand beneath it.
Reed crossed Parque Central in the heart of Havana, walking beneath the almond trees and iron lampposts. The triangular roof of the Tacón theater rose above the treetops. He waited for the horse-and-buggy traffic to slow before crossing the street at the Inglaterra Hotel, its neoclassical façade a perfect series of windows and wrought-iron balconies. Next door, between the Inglaterra and Hotel Telegrafo, he walked beneath white columns and archways to the doorway of a narrow building. Even from the street, he had heard the sound of cocktail-laced laughter and smelled the cigar smoke from the open, floor-to-ceiling windows. His dress shoes clapped against the tile as he climbed the narrow case of thirty-one stairs and entered the dining salon of Old Delmonico’s Restaurant. The room trembled with candlelight reflecting off crystal, the voices drowning out the music and street traffic below. The dinner was in honor of Carlos Finlay and his mosquito hypothesis; all of the speeches were given in Spanish. Juan Guitéras, the longtime yellow fever doctor who had served both on the 1879 Yellow Fever Commission and as the doctor treating Victor Vaughan at Siboney, was the master of ceremonies. He compared Finlay to Sir Patrick Manson, who first proposed that malaria could be spread by mosquitoes, and Reed to Ronald Ross, who had given the final proof. Carlos Finlay was given a bronze statuette in honor of his valuable work. He would also be nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1905, 1906, 1907, 1912, 1913, 1914 and 1915 for his work with yellow fever, though he would never win. And to this day, Carlos Finlay is Cuba’s most revered physician.
At close to midnight, Finlay raised his glass: “Twenty years ago, guided by indications which I deemed certain, I sallied forth