The American Plague - Molly Caldwell Crosby [98]
Gorgas again applied his aggressive techniques toward destroying the mosquito and all of its breeding grounds. Once again, Gorgas met with success. Though he continued to receive criticism from skeptics during the first few years of the canal project, he outlasted them all; and he was still the officer on duty when, in 1914, the first ships sailed through the Panama Canal. Gorgas wiped out the mosquitoes, and the cases of yellow fever and malaria dropped off the charts. By 1908, William C. Gorgas had been appointed president of the American Medical Association, and then he was named surgeon general of the U.S. Army, occupying that office during World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic. But what Gorgas most looked forward to was returning his focus to the eradication of yellow fever. In 1920, Gorgas traveled to London en route to Africa where he would take part in a yellow fever study. While in London, Gorgas was to be honored by King George V. Before he could attend his own ceremony, however, Gorgas suffered a stroke and was admitted to a London hospital. The king visited Gorgas there, granting him knighthood. Sir William C. Gorgas died four weeks later.
After the death of Juan Guitéras’s volunteers in Havana, most notably Clara Maass, the public protest against human volunteers reached an all-time high. That, with the fact that the army had eliminated most of the mosquito’s breeding places in Havana and surrounding areas, prompted the government to halt any further testing. Carroll returned to the United States. Though Sternberg recommended that Carroll be promoted to the rank of major, it was denied due to a moratorium on promotions. Instead, Carroll received a regular army commission as first lieutenant. It was not until 1907 that he would be promoted to the rank of major as a Special Act of Congress. In the same year, Carroll began suffering from heart problems. It was suspected that because of his age and the tremendous toll yellow fever took on his body, his heart had suffered irreparable damage. James Carroll died of valvular heart disease on September 16, 1907.
When the Yellow Fever Board was dismantled, Agramonte decided to stay in Cuba where he began teaching at the University of Havana. His work with yellow fever, however, did not come to an end. He continued to champion Dr. Carlos Finlay and also defended the commission’s findings against future medical experiments involving yellow fever. Agramonte returned to the U.S. as a professor of tropical medicine at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, where he died in 1931. He was the only member of the Yellow Fever Board still alive to receive the gratitude of the U.S. government.
In 1929, through an Act of Congress, Walter Reed, Jesse Lazear, Aristides Agramonte, James Carroll and the men who volunteered for the human experiments were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, so that their services, in the interest of humanity, may never be forgotten. The names of those men are: James H. Andrus, John R. Bullard, A. W. Covington, William H. Dean, Wallace W. Forbes, Levi E. Folk, Paul Hamann, James L. Hanberry, Warren G. Jernegan, John R. Kissinger, John J. Moran, William Olsen, Charles G. Sontag, Clyde L. West, R. P. Cooke, Thomas M. England, James Hildebrand and Edward Weatherwalks. Nearly thirty years later, two more names were added to that list: Gustaf E. Lambert and Roger P. Ames, the nurse and doctor who treated the majority of yellow fever cases at Camp Lazear.
Major William Borden, the friend who had performed Reed’s operation, began a campaign to build what would become known as “Borden’s Dream.” Borden wanted to combine the Army Medical Museum, Army Medical School and Surgeon General’s Library into a single medical center. And he wanted to name it for his friend Walter Reed.
It would take years to get the appropriate funding to buy the forty-three acres