The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [95]
A friend who visited him there that summer remarked, “He was very much worn by his scientific labours, but it was also evident that he felt most keenly the attempts which were being made by persons high in authority to rob him of his just fame for the work which he had done.”
Reed had even written in a letter to his wife, shortly after his success in Cuba, predicting that Sternberg would attempt to take credit. “Of course,” Reed wrote, “he will, at once, write an article and say that for 20 years he has considered the mosquito as the most probable cause of yellow fever. That would be just in order for him to do so.” Reed was right. Sternberg published an article in Popular Science Monthly in which he claimed credit for the idea of the intermediary host. Reed wrote in a letter to a friend that “You might tell Dr. Finlay, too, with my best compliments, that he had better look to his laurels as the prosper of the Mosquito Theory, since Dr. Sternberg, in an article in the July Popular Science Monthly, puts forward his name very conspicuously for the credit for our work in Cuba.” Reed added, “This is the reward for our work in Cuba! He knows, as well as I do, that he only mentioned Finlay’s theory to condemn it!”
Sternberg could not bear to see another great medical discovery made without his name stamped upon it. He continually attempted to take credit for the discovery, and in 1905, when applying for a promotion in rank, Sternberg wrote: “I beg leave to call attention to the fact that the important discovery that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes was due to my initiative. Withoutdetracting in the least from the honor due Major Walter Reed and his assistants, who demonstrated this fact by a masterly series of experiments, the official records will show that this investigation was made upon my recommendation, and that the members of the Board were selected by me. I, also, gave personal instructions to the President of the Board, and pointed out to him the direction this experimental investigation should take.”
Worst of all for Reed was the fact that his mind had grown weaker. As he was leaving his house for the Columbia lecture hall one evening, Reed shook his head and complained to his wife, Emilie, “I can’t realize that I wrote this lecture, it is utterly beyond my mental capacity now.”
By fall of that year, Walter Reed described himself as “a sick man.” He returned home on November 12, in pain, telling Emilie that he must have eaten something disagreeable. His abdomen was tender, and he began to think it was appendicitis. Although he requested his favorite breakfast, waffles, Emilie took the advice of his doctors and refused him heavy foods. Reed spent the morning in bed reading the paper and planning the garden for Keewaydin. But that night, his temperature rose, and his friends, William Borden and Jefferson Randolph Kean, decided to operate. The next morning, he was sent to the Army Hospital at Washington Barracks, but even as he left his bedroom, he refused a stretcher and insisted on walking. He even stopped at his desk on the way out to write a check.
Major Borden, an expert on appendicitis, would perform the surgery, but Reed’s longtime friend, Kean, would be there as well. In the operating room, an intern assembled the inhaler, a tank of nitrous oxide and an ether can. He asked Reed if he had any false teeth. “No,” he said emphatically. As the ether began to pull at his consciousness, Reed turned to his friend Kean and said, “I am not afraid of the knife but if anything should happen, I am leaving my wife and daughter so little. So little, so little,” he repeated.
The surgery, which took an hour and a half, revealed an enlarged and partially