 | CHAPTER XVI Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
16. CHAPTER XVI
Reed's new talents had little opportunity to expand in
his ten month's at Fort Snelling, nor were they particularly ap-
preciated. His Commanding Officer, in a routine report, remarked
that his character and attention to duty were excellent, his sci-
entific attainments “nothing special,” and his prominent talents
“none.” If Reed had known, it would probably have cause him
rueful amusement, and no surprise at all. How could a colonel of
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medical officers? How should he know the difference between a
horse doctor and a bacteriologist?
The indifference of the line officers notwithstan-
ding, the Medical Corps was beginning to win a little renown for
the bacteriological work of some of its members. Sternberg's ex-
cellent text book on the subject, the first ever written in the
United States, appeared in 1892. reflecting credit on the
service. Reed drew favorable attention in interested circles with
his first paper, published in March of the same year in the Boston
Medical and Surgical Journal, on the contagiousness of erysipelas.
Some of the more enlightened intelligences of the line, as well as
inof the Medical Corps, were beginning to get the idea that, since
sickness regularly took heavier toll of an army in the field
than enemy action, the Medical Corps was important, especially in
preventive work.
As Reed went about his old routine -sick call, visits to
officers' families, hospital work, -he wondered when he would be
able to go back to bacteriology. As he regretfully wrote to Stern-
berg, his regular duties left him time only for “dabbling” in his
favorite field.
“If only Sternberg would be appointed to succeed Suther-
land when he retires for age!” he exclaimed longingly to his wife.
“Then I'd get the opportunity to do the work I'm really keen about.”
“Maybe he will be,” she encouraged him. “Let's keep our
fingers crossed.”
Reed's transfer to the staff of General Wesley Merritt in
St. Paul, in August, 1892, was welcome: a city was always better
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they could have their son with them again. With the boy atten-
ding St. Paul High School, Reed thought, maybe he could keep an
eye on his work, which he was inclined to neglect.
As attending surgeon and examiner of recruits on Merritt's
staff, Reed had an opportunity to appreciate the general's ad-
vanced opinion, entirely sympathetic to his own, that one of the
Medical Corp's Corps' most important functions should be the pre-
vention of disease among the troops. He was reminded, as well,
how far behind him now, how almost forgotten, was the civil con-
flict that had dominated his childhood and youth. Merritt, a
Union officer then, had had a share in the devastation of the
Shenandoah Valley. Now the Yankee general and the Virginia doc-
tor, ignoring the old enmity, were loyally serving their country
together.
* * *
It was the evening of March 28th, 1893. The meeting of
the Ramsey County Medical Society was breaking up, and the young
high school teacher standing on the edge of the group around the
Army doctor had an opportunitya chance to get a good look at him. He
saw a man in his early forties, erect and slender and a little a-
bove medium height. Mr. Wilson liked his quick, animated manner,
and the courteous attentiveness with which he was listening to
Dr. Millar, dean of the University of Minnesota Medical School.
His bearing suggested that, although he was known as an excellent
bacteriologist and a fine doctor, he was also a modest man. He
had attended the meeting as a guest speaker to talk on the chol-
era germ, the fatal comma-shaped bacillus which was just then
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The medical officer, his face lighting with a quick smile,
made some remark which the teacher on the edge of the circle did
not catch. Laughter followed it, and as the group shifted a little
Wilson moved closer and caught Dr. Millard's eye. Beckoning him
forward, Millard presented him to Reed.
“Dr. Reed,” he said, “I'd like you to meet Louis Wilson,
one of our medical students. He teaches biology at the Central
High, and has a laboratory there.”
Reed, the smile still lingering around his blue eyes, turned
eagerly to Wilson. “Young man,” he exclaimed as he shook hands
with him, “do you really have a laboratory?”
“Yes, sir. It's nothing elaborate, though. But for a high
school lab it isn't bad.”
“You should see mine -all I have is a few test tubes.”
“If you'd care to come over and have a look at mine....”
Wilson suggested diffidently.
“When may I come?” Reed asked promptly. “Tomorrow?”
When they said good night, it would have been hard to tell
which was the more elated: the student at having the opportunity
to work with the medical officer who knew about bacteriology, or
the doctor at the prospect of again getting into a laboratory.
It was a good thing for Reed and Wilson that Central High
decided to discontinue its domestic science department. They
were able to salvage from it a couple of gas ovens and some boilers
and make them into fairly effective bacteriological apparatus.
Reed spent most of the time he could spare from his regular duties
helping to fix up the laboratory and working in it.
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Diphtheria had always interested him. Now he heard that
a New York physician, Dr. William H. Park, had begun to diagnose
it from cultures made from swabs of patients' throats. If the cul-
ture, examined under a microscope, showed the diphtheria bacillyus,
he at once knew that the patient had diphtheria.. If the culture
was free of the bacillus, he knew that he was dealing with some-
thing else. The method eliminated the danger of mistaking the
serious disease for less grave types of croup which it resembled
in its earlier stages. Reed and Wilson obtained from Dr. Park a
sample of his apparatus, which consisted simply of a small box and
two test tubes, one containing a sterile swab and the other a cul-
ture medium in which diphtheria germs would grow.
“A nice, simletsimple little outfit,” Reed observed as he ex-
amined it. “What do you think, Wilson, about getting some our-
selves and asking the local doctors to send us swabs when they
suspect somethi diphtheria?”
“It's a good idea doctor, I'm sure a number of them
would do it. We can have the box factory make us up some of
these little boxes. It oughtn't to cost much.”
“I hope it won't. It will have to come out of our own
pockets, since it's neither Army nor school work,” Reed remarked.
“Let's try to squeeze out a hundred,” Wilson suggested.
"That oughtn't to cost us too much. “I'm very keen to do it. I
don't suppose it's been done outside of New York, do you?”
The two men scraped the bottoms of their pockets -Reed
had recently sold his lot at Crawford, Nebraska, so he had a little
spare money -and ordered a hundred boxes. Together they worked
over the diphtheria study off and on during most of the summer.
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ogy, Reed felt the deep satisfaction of introducing a promising
young man into the field for which he himself felt such enthusi-
asm. Investigating and teaching others to investigate, that was
what he would like to do, he thought. That was the really radi-
cal way to attack disease. Learn to prevent it, and you would
never have to cure it.
* * *
Reed wanted to toss his hat in the air. At last,
at last, it had happened! George Miller Sternberg was Surgeon
General, appointed late in May, 1893, to succeed General Suth-
erland! It was significant of the changing atmosphere, the grow-
ing appreciation of modern scientific medicine, that President
Cleveland had selected not an able executive, not a man adroit
in departmental politics, not merely a good doctor, but the one
man in the Corps with a distinguished reputation as a scientist.
The fossil age, Reed jubilantly declared, was past.
One of the new Surgeon General's first official acts
was to establish the Army Medical School, improvising it, with a
wary eye on a Congress already exercised over the current finan-
cial panic, in such a way as to add nothing to the expenses of
the Army's medical department. Its classrooms were in the buil-
ding which already housed the Army Medical Museum and the Surgeon
General's Library, and medical officers composed the faculty.
Sternberg, who admired and liked Reed, appointed him professor of
clinical and sanitary microscopy and curator of the museum, which
already had all the materials for bacteriological and chemical
study that the new school would need, for laboratory use. John
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man of enormous influence in the medical world, became professor
of military hygiene, and Sternberg, although not a member of the
faculty, lectured on bacteriology.
Reed, summoned to Washington from St. Paul to be examined
for promotion to major, appeared on September 6th, 1893, at the
red brick building backing on the Mall where he was to spend most
of the short remainder of his life. In response to his examiners'
questions, he discussed typhoid, pneumonia, tuberculosis, gunshot
wounds, antisepsis and malaria to their full satisfaction. Three
days later he was pronounced “physically and professionally fit
for promotion.” In December, after he had returned to take up his
new duties in Washington, he was advanced to the rank of major.
The Washington to which Reed and his family returned
after a dozen years' absensce was a city of more than two hundred
thousand people. Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat to win the
presidency since the Civil War, was presiding for the second time
over the White House, and, somewhat more uneasily, over the nation-
al destiny. The Washington Monument, completed in 1884, was a well-
established landmark. Sturdy little mules pulled the street
cars along the shaded avenues. A few of those mechanical wonders,
the electric trolleys, had invaded the streets and, propelled as
if by magic, suggested to the far-seeing that horse cars might be
on their way out. Electric lights and telephones were almost
commonplace. The State, War and Navy Building, squatting massive
and ornate beside the simple presidential residence, was finished
at last. The city had elegant mansions built like Italian palaces
and French chateausx along its wide avenues. There were good res-
taurants, good hotels, and a half dozen theatres which tempted
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Henry Irving, Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Langtry. The capital was
taking its national dignity seriously.
Mrs. Reed unpacked their much-traveled household goods
for what seemed the hundredth time, with positive elation. They
were settling in Washington! No more ugly officers' quarters, no
more frontier inconveniences -for a while, anyway. This was civ-
ilization. She thought she could never get enough of it.
“Dr. Reed,” she threatened her husband playfully, “if you
ever go west of the Mississippi again, you're going alone!”
Reed laughed reassuringly. “Well, my dear, I don't think
you need worry about that for a while. We'll be here for a few
years. Anyway, I've just about done my share of frontier duty.
That's for the younger fellows. For that matter, there's not much
frontier left any more, the way the country's being settled. And
travel so much easier, too.”
Mrs. Reed's expression was reminiscent. “It was fun, though.
Remember what heavenly duck you could roast in those little Dutch
ovens that we always carried in the doherty wagons -the ones you
set over coals and stacked coals on top of?”
“Mmmmmm,” Reed agreed appreciatively. “Travel by doherty
wagon had advantages, like game en route, but I think I prefer
the iron horse now. I'm not the valiant frontiersman I was fif-
teen years ago. Now I'm an aging medical officer who's had his
fill of the west and the Indians and the rest of the trimmings.”
Mrs. Reed smiled at him. It wasn't that he was
tired of adventure, she knew that. The adventurous spirit that
had filtered through generations from his earliest American an-
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Booker's one room school was still strong in the doctor to whom
“the west and the Indians and the rest of the trimmings” were
now an old story. It was simply that he had discovered a new
and more exciting frontier in the world of bacteriology.
172.
| CHAPTER XVI Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |