 | CHAPTER XV Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
15. CHAPTER XV
The path to the future, however, was not yet clear. It
must have been a deep disappointment to Reed when he was told
not to spend any time on bacteriology, the promising branch of
medicine that was throwing new light on the origin and spread
of contagious diseases. Surgeon General Baxter had made it
plain that he was permitted to study at Hopkins so that he could
learn more about the treatment of sick and wounded soldiers, not
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connection between the two activities apparently did not occur
to the senior officer.
Then fortune, which had been with Reed only enough to
tantalize him, came over to his side wholeheartedly. The new
Surgeon General, Charles Sutherland, who was appointed on Bax-
ter's sudden death, gave him permission to do laboratory work
in bacteriology under Dr. William Henry Welch.
When Reed arrived in Baltimore in October, 1890, Johns
Hopkins did not have a medical school. One of the investments
of the thrifty Quaker who had given the institution his name and
his fortune had turned out so badly that there were no funds
for it yet. Graduate doctors, however, were coming from all
over the country to work in the hospital and laboratories with
William Osler, Howard A. Kelly, William S. Halstead and Welch,
the “Four Doctors” of John Singer Sargeant's well known painting.
Welch had established, in 1885, a laboratory which was
already famous for the training it gave young men in pathology
and bacteriology. Celebrated as the leading exponent of modern
medicine in this country, Welch was only a year older than Reed.
He had gone about his medical education more slowly,
taking his degree at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in
New York in February, 1875, at the same time that Reed, crammed
with facts and dates, was undergoing his grilling at the hands
of the Army medical examining board. While Reed was doctoring
the routine ills of hardy young soldiers on frontier posts, Welch
was studying the new medicine in Germany, with the men who were
contributing most to its brilliant advance. On his return to
the United States he gave, at Bellevue Hospital Medical College,
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ican medical school. His growing reputation as a scientist and
teacher induced the trustees of Johns Hopkins University, who were
gradually collecting a medical faculty, to invite him to teach
and pathology and bacteriology. Welch, who loved research and
detested the prospect of practicing for a living, eagerly accepted,
and began his long and influential career at Hopkins in the fall
of 1885.
Plump, bright-eyed, baldish and bewhiskered, at the age
of forty he was already moving in the aura of greatness that was
to grow steadily stronger for the rest of his life. His students
regarded him with a sort of affectionate awe, and called him Popsy
behind his back. All of them, including Reed, were well fitted
to his novel method of teaching which was based on the belief that
medical students in this country were over-taught, directed and
guided until their self-reliance was stifled. Popsy would de-
liver the lecture in bacteriology or pathology three times a week
and demonstrated the subject of it at the microscope; or, if he
felt like it, he would fail to appear and leave the session to
his assistant. Students selected their own special problems for
study without advice from him. With his long cigar
tilted at an angle and his rounded waistcoat sprinkled
with ash, he would go among them at the end of the demonstration,
encouraging and suggesting, and then proceed to his own micro-
scope and the work that currently held his interest.
Reed, from the first moment, loved the Pathological, as
Welch's laboratory was called. It was full of alert young men,
enthusiastically investigating problems in the new fields of
bacteriology and pathology, who discussed, experimented andjo
joked together endlessly. The scientific curiosity
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the most stimulating place in which he had ever worked.
The work table in the Pathological extended under the
windows along three sides of the room. Each student had his own
space on it, where he kept his microscope, slides, notebook and
other working materials. Reed was assigned a space at the end
of the table next to a soft-spoken young doctor from Louisville,
Simon Flexner. Absorbed in his work, Flexner at first scarcely
noticed the Army man working next to him; the only effect of his
arrival was to prevent him from spreading out as freely as he had
done before. One day Reed came into the laboratory and found
Flexner working at his microscope, with his materials, as usual,
spilling over unnoticed into the next space.
“Well, doctor,” Reed observed smilingly, as he sat down
at the tiny space left, “you'll soomn have me clear off the
end, won't you?”
Deeply agbashed, the younger man started to apologize for
his thoughtlessness. “I'm so sorry,” he stammered, “I hadn't
realized.....”
Seeing the laughter in Reed's eyes, he began to smile, too.
He decided he liked this friendly newcomer.
A sort of family feeling, based on enthusiasm for their
work and admiration of Welch, prevailed among the laboratory
workers. Reed was soon accepted cordially into the intimate
circle of the students and their teacher, all of whom were quick
to respond to his charm and to recognize his ability.
Welch, urbane, kindly and aloof, paid little per-
sonal attention to any student until he had given evidence of
ability. It was not long, however, unti before he became inter-
ested
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to pathology and bacteriology, was already showing marked
aptitude for the work. Reed and Welch probably liked the same
things in each other: the dignity which, while friendly and pleas-
ant, forbade familiarity; the scholarly and inquiring attitude of
mind; the scientific enthusiasm and the personal graciousness.
The two doctors became cordial friends.
Reed's military duties took little time, and he worked in
the laboratory early and late, searching far beyond class require-
ments and eagerly learning his way around the fascinating new
world that had so nearly escaped him. He learned to recognize the
murderers of the microscopic world, the slender motionless bacil-
lus that causes diphtheria, the rod-shaped tubercle bacillus, the
comma-shaped germ of the Asiatic cholera whose ravages he had a
few times seen in New York, and the other villains invisible to
the naked eye.
As soon as he became familiar with the new technical methods,
he began to do independent work. Anxious to make up for his late
start, he haunted autopsies to obtain pathological material to
study. On these occasions he often saw Osler, and became friendly
with this beloved and brilliant man who was known to the younger
doctors as “The Chief.”
Osler was working on malaria at the time. Welch was inves-
tigating both hog-cholera with Dr. A. W. Clement, a veterinarian,
and diphtheria, the anti-toxin for which had just been discovered,
with Alexander C. Abbott, one of his students. Reed followed
these investigations as well as his own. During the winter, too,
he probably attended the lectures in which Welch, in his logical
and lucid way, covered the entire subject of diphtheria. He reg-
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ciety and to the monthly ones of its medical historical society.
Reed knew his time at Hopkins was to be short, and he wanted to
squeeze every possible advantage out of it.
His work was interrupted just before Christmas when he
was ordered, to Blossom's inconsolable grief, to Fort Keogh, Mon-
tana, for a short time. When he returned to Baltimore toward
the end of January, he was grateful for the friendliness and co-
operation of his fellow-workers: Flexner and William T. Howard,
another of Welch's young men, during his absence had mounted for
him pathological speciments which they thought he might want to
study.
Reed usually had lunch with his new friends at the “Church”
-it somehow sounded better, if you were a serious scientific man,
to say you'd be at the “Church” than at the tavern -across the
street from the hospital.
In the private dining room which the proprietor
kept for the laboratory doctors they could have beer for five
cents a schooner, and a lunch of wild duck, or sea food in season,
or sandwiches for a quarter, and enjoy an hour's relaxation. The
younger men would urge the Army doctor to tell about post life,
and he would tell of his adventures as cook and medicine man, or
of the hardships of travel by doherty wagon or horseback in sub-
zero weather, or of the discomforts and boredom of garrison life.
In the companionship of these friendly, enthusiastic young scien-
tific workers, it all seemed very remote, so distant and so dif-
different from this congenial new life where modern medicine was
taken for granted, and where the desire to study it was regarded
160
In the late afternnon when Schutz, Welch's laboratory helper,
seemed about to sweep him out, Reed would leave the laboratory
and walk down the hill from the hospital to the boarding house
where he was living with Mrs. Reed and Blossom. The apartment
seemed almost empty now, with Lawrence in school at Bedford, where
Reed himself had lived as a child, and Susie gone, too. The In-
dian girl who had lived with them for the last dozen years,
helping with the housework and sewing, had stayed with the Apaches
at Mount Vernon Barracks to teach them English. (The Reeds, inci-
dentally, never saw her again, since she went with her people to
Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and died there about 1902.) Blossom was the
only juvenile member of the household. “Little daughter,”
now seven years old, took up most of her adoring father's spare
time.
In the evenings Reed would sometimes go to a concert with
his wife, or, more frequently, to one of the medical meetings.
Usually, though, he had work to do, and looked up articles in the
medical journals in the hospital library, or studied German so that
he could follow the work being done by German scientists.
Although Reed did not join the younger doctors in their
Saturday night poker games, he occasionally had dinner with Popsy,
whose good food, good wine and good conversation were memor-
able. On summer afternoons he would sometimes leave his work to
go with Welch or Flexner or Councilman, Welch's assistant, to the
ball game. Baltimore at that time had occasion to be very proud
of its Orioles, and Welch was an enthusiastic fan. Shortly before
the game he was likely to appear at the laboratory door, his
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mouth, and coax them away from their microscopes. He rarely had
to use persuasion. Few people could resist the prospect of
spending the afternoon with Popsy, whether at thea ball game or
an autopsy.
By May, Reed knew enough to undertake his first big
piece of scientific investigation. He had noticed in autopsies
that victims of typhoid fever had tiny nodules, or lumps, in the
lymph glands of the liver. Under Welch's supervision, he under-
took to study these nodules. As he worked tirelessly over his
problem, it probably never occurred to him that the
few months' scientific training he was then receiving were to turn
him from a competent, obscure Amry doctor into a scientific in-
vestigator who would solve one of the gravest health problems that
had ever bedevilled the public and baffled the medical profession.
But he did know that his old sense of dissatisfaction, the feel-
ing of being left behind, was gone for good. He had had to wait
until his fortieth year, but now he was learning something beyond
the mere treatment of diseases; he was beginning to understand a
little about the organisms causing disease, and to think in terms
of prevention rather than of cure.
His summer's work was broken into several times by
military duties that called him away from Baltimore. Each time
he reluctantly laid aside his investigation, confident, however,
that one of the other men, or perhaps Welch himself, would carry
on his animal experiments for him. In June he went to West Point
to give physical examinations to candidates for the Military Academy
and members of the graduating class. Lawrence was already talking
about becoming a soldier. Reed examined the fit and intelligent
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terest, for he hoped that his son, too, would qualify to enter
the Academy.
Then he had to go to Washington as a member of another
board; and in October to New York, to sit on the board examining
Medical Corps aspirants. More than sixteen years separated the
young Health Inspector, anxiously approaching the fateful exam-
ination, from the medical officer in the blue dress uniform sitting
in judgement on a new generation of nervous candidates, but Reed
could still remember his alarm and depression. He hoped
these poor fellows were not feeling like that, or, if they were,
that they would be able to look back sixteen years hence and feel,
like him, that it had been worth it.
In spite of interruptions, however, he managed to complete
his typhoid fever study. By November, when he had to leave for
his new post at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, he had produced the
little lumps experimentally in laboratory animals, and had demon-
strated that they originated as small groups of dead liver cells.
Reed was confident now that he had found the work to
which he could enthusiastically devote the rest of his life.
163.
| CHAPTER XV Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |