 | CHAPTER XVII Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
17. CHAPTER XVII
Time was gliding past, Reed realized with a slight sense
of surprise, and he, as he advanced into his fifth decade, was
settling slowly into a middle age of inconspicuous usefulness.
After twenty years of active practice, he could now devote him-
self to the teaching and investigating that appealed to him so
strongly.
It was natural that the first thing he should do was
renew his contacts with his friends at Johns Hopkins. He and
173.
Welch's laboratory, made frequent trips to Baltimore to keep
in touch with the work carried on there, and to attend medical
meetings. The long delayed medical school had been opened in the
fall of 1893 with eighteen students -three of them women, to the
disquietude of the modest bachelor, Dr. Welch -and Reed followed
all the affairs of the new school with interest.
Hopkins doctors often came to the capital, too, for med-
ical meetings and to consult the Surgeon General's Library which,
under the direction of John Shaw Billings, had already attained
the position it still holds as the most complete medical library
in the United States. With Sternberg, Billings, Reed and Carroll
all in Washington, the link between Hopkins and the Medical Corps
was close.
Reed, lecturing to the rising generation of medical of-
ficers and directing them in their laboratory work, may sometimes
have thought of his old schoolmaster's query: “What mind was
ever lighted up or warmed by that which was dark and cold?” He
war turning out to be a teacher patterned on Mr. Abbot's ideal,
with an enthusiasm for his subjects that his students found con-
tagious, and such intimate knowledge of it that it seemed to be
part of himself.
A straight man with a drooping mustache, a little heav-
ier now but still slender, and with the slight frown of concen-
tration habitually fixed on his face as though he were always
thinking ahead of his words, he would stand before his class and
discuss his complicated subject with a clarity that almost com-
pelled understanding. Peering through a microscope, he would ex-
plain what was there to some bewildered novice and kindly, with
a few words, take the trouble to dispel his discouragement. He
174.
courteous patience as he did for bacteriology by his lucid pre-
sentations. Young Dr. Leonard Wood, arriving in Washington in
1885 after a tour of duty in the west, was one of Reed's enthus-
iastic students.
His assistant, Carroll, was devoted to him, and Reed
felt warm respect for the quiet, retiring man who worked with
him so ably. Born in England in 1854, Carroll had come to Can-
ada as a boy, and, at the age of twenty, enlisted in the United
States Army. He became interested in medicine and while still a
soldier in the newly-formed Hospital Corps won his medical degree
at the University of Maryland. After his work in Welch's labor-
atory, he was attached in 1893 to the Army Medical School as
Reed's assistant. He had a wife and a family of small children.
Reed could appreciate what a long, uphill grind it must have
been for him to reach his modest eminence, and what sacrifice
and devotion must have gone into the achievement.
Reed loved his new life. “You can accomplish so much
more good for so many more people by training other men in mod-
ern medicine,” he answered when Mrs. Reed asked him if he missed
practicing. “And that's what counts with me. I might be able
to save ten children strangling with diphtheria, but if I teach
ten men to use antitoxin, they can save a hundred.”
Training his students in modern ways and coverting
established practitioners to new methods presented two different
problems, Reed found. The use of diphtheria anti-toxin was an
example. Loeffler had discovered the specific germ, and his
find had been widely confirmed by independent workers. Then
175.
ized horses to diphtheria toxin and produced the anti-toxin that
both prevents and cures. When Roux read his paper at the Inter-
national Congress on Hygiene at Budapest in 1894, the scientists
listening to him in the stuffy classroom of the old university had
jumped shouting on their seats and tossed their hats into the air.
Hat tossing, however, was not general throughout the profession.
Although laboratories all over Europe, America and Japan promptly
began to produce anti-toxin, a number of doctors remained uncon-
vinced.
When the District of Columbia Medical Society met in
December, 1894, a doctor of wide reputation assailed a paper
supporting the use of the anti-toxin. He was not unfriendly to the
new remedy, he said, but based his criticisms on the statistics
and arguments of others, not on his own experience. Reed entered
the argument discussion. He had never regretted the long period
he had spent in general practice before getting into his specialty.
Now it enabled him to speak not only as a laboratory man but as
a practitioner of experience.
“You are theorizing,” he got to his feet and earnestly, al-
most sternly, addressed the other doctor. “We are dealing with
facts. If another friend of anti-toxin arises and deals it such a
blow, the anti-toxin serum will be murdered in the house of its
friends. I myself almost feel like saying that the failure to
use it in a case of human diphtheria is criminal; and I beg you,”
he added urgently, “that, if you have not yet done so, when you
next stand by the bedside of your patient afflicted with this
disease, you do not withhold this invaluable remedy.”
A strong word, criminal; but his seriousness, backed by
176.
of the anti-toxin was not again questioned in that society.
Sternberg's routine reports sounded nothing like the one
his Commanding Officer at Fort Snelling had written in 1892. So
far as the limitations of the standard government form allowed,
they were glowing. In his heavy, sprawling writing, the Surgeon
General yearly wrote the almost monotonous praise: excellent char-
acter and professional qualifications, excellent control over the
men under him, highly skilled bacteriologist, a valuable man in
his work. Sternberg, dwelling on distant official heights in the
State, War and Navy Building and occupied with executive duties
that left him no time for the research he loved, no doubt wist-
fully envied his subordintate.
There was no lack in these years of the stimulating con-
tacts which Reed had missed on the frontier. In the spring of
1895 he was appointed a delegate from the Medical Corps to attend
the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Balti-
more. Later the same season, Welch and Osler came to Washington
for the meeting of the Association of American Physicians at
which Welch, analysing the world literature on diphtheria anti-
toxin, asserted that it was “a specific curative agent for diph-
theria, surpassing in its efficacy all other known methods of
treatment.” How it must have gratified Reed to hear him express
the opinion he had so forcibly stated himself: “It is the duty of
the physician to use it.”
By no means through with the subject of anti-toxin now
that its “friends” were no longer likely to slaughter it, Reed
told the District Medical Society that its manufacture should be
177.
inated serum by careless or unscrupulous individuals.
He was busier than ever before in his life. Not only did
he teach at the Army and Columbian University Medical Schools,
serve on examining boards, attend medical meetings, consult with
other doctors when his specialized knowledge was needed, but he
worked in his laboratory on croupous pneumonia,
erysipelas, abdominal typhus, malaria and other subjects, and
published his observations in scientific journals.
For a time he was even busier than necessary, trying to keep
up with the overwhelming supply of white rats which sent him by
his nephew Walter, Tom's son. Reed had seen Walter on a visit to
Ashland his sister Laura in Ashland in the summer of 1894. The
enterprising boy, learning that his uncle used white rats in his
experiments, undertook to supply them. He went about it with such
energy that the laboratory was swamped. Reed, unable to keep up
think of enough experiments to use them up, had to write his name-
sake to cease shipment.
He left the house in Georgetown, at Number 5 Cooke Place,
early in the morning to take the horse car to the museum. When
he came back in the late afternoon Blossom, his favorite companion,
would meet him at the corner where he got off. She was eleven years
old now, and went to school at Gunston Hall in Washington. Law-
rence was in high school. He was a tall, good looking fellow more
addicted to sports than to study, and usually was off playing
ball when his father came home. If the children and the friends
waylaid him as he came up the street, he would stand by their gate
with them for a few minutes, laughing and joking. His wife,
watching from the porch, thought how youthful he looked, with his
178.
gaging young man -sweet-natured, happy, deeply in earnest about
his responsibility to the sick -with whom she had so promptly
fallen in love twenty years before, existed almost unchanged -a
little graver, a little more serene, perhaps -in the middle-aged
doctor.
* * *
Lawrence's special admiration were the Blackford
girls, three sisters who lived across the street. They had a
pair of smooth-haired fox terriers with the good Virginia names
of Shirley and Carter. The jaunty little dogs were favorites
through the neighborhood, and it was a widely lamented calamity
when Shirley, rushing to hurl insults at a passing horse car,
skidded and had his left hind foot badly mangled under a wheel.
His tearful mistresses hurried him to the veterinarian who am-
putated the crushed paw.
Reed, on his way home one afternoon, waved to Blossom
and the three young girls who, followed by their who were approach-
ing down the street. They crossed over to meet him with Carter
jumping at their heels and Shirley hobbling behind.
“Hello, Shirley,” Reed bent to pat the small, sleek
head, “I haven't seen you since your operation.”
“Poor darling, he's quite wretched about it still,”
Lily said.
Reed whistled as he caught sight of the amputation.
“No wonder! Poor old fellow,” he exclaimed.
“Oh dear, Major Reed, doesn't it look right?”
Reed was stooping beside the little dog who, trustful
179.
“It won't heal properly like this, Miss Lily,” he explained.
“That end of bone ought to come off.” He paused a moment, rubbing
the dog's ear and thinking: the examining board in the morning,
laboratory all afternoon -Carroll can take care of that for a
while -I can manage it. “I'll tell you what you do -bring him
to me tomorrow afternoon at the laboratory, and I'll fix him up
so it won't bother him any more.”
Smiling under the ecstatic barrage of thanks, Reed waved
the sisters goodbye from the gate and went up the walk, his arm
through Blossom's.
Landon followed him with her eyes, exclaiming, “Isn't that
the sweetest thing you've ever heard of! Shirley, you're a lucky
dog!”
“How's my patient?” Reed greeted Lily and Shirley the next
afternoon when they appeared at the laboratory.
“He's calm, thank you,” Lily told him. “He has the great-
est confidence in his new doctor.”
“Well, I'll try to justify it. Come along in here.”
Lily watched the doctor's adroit, gentle hands with admir-
ation. He was one of the busiest medical officers in the Army,
and he took the time, personally, to operate on an uinjured dog.
Shirley lay quiet under ether while Reed worked. The protruding
bit of bone was off now, a flap of skin tucked over the end and a
neat bandage adjusted over the wound.
“There! That oughtn't to trouble him any more, as soon
as it heals,” Reed remarked.
“I can't think you enough, Mjor Reed,” Lily faltered, as
180.
found so charming, to the door. “When you're so busy, to go to
this trouble...”
Reed dismissed the thanks with his quick smile. “Not at
all, my dear. We couldn't have Shirley an invalid for the rest
of his life, could we?”
Shirley, it may be added here, was from then on almost as
good as new. He quickly learned to run, dodge and throw himself
into reverse with one hind leg as well as he had with two, and
he lived, with Carter, to a hale and rowdy old age.
** * *
The little stearmer ran from the mainland to Key West
three times a week, carrying passengers, mail, food and some-
times water. Waiting on the pier as the few passengers debarked,
Dr. Jefferson Randolph Kean scanned them for the medical officer
from Washington. Kean, although he had never seen him, recognized
him at once, and smiled to notice how closely his appearance cor-
responded with descriptions of him he had heard ten years before
at Fort Robinson. The mustache was heavier and he was unprepared
for the blueness of the eyes, but he could have picked him out of
a much larger crowd than this.
Sitting in the evenings on the veranda of Kean's quarters
at Key West Barracks, the two officers and Mrs. Kean, her dress
a pale graceful blur in the dark, talked, or fell into the sil-
ences which congenial people do not fear. Reed was enjoying his
stay at Key West so much, he told them, that this detail was
equivalent toas good as a holiday.
He had been sent toward the end of July, 1896, by the Sur-
geon General to investigate an epidemic of small pox at Key West,
181.
with the disease the same microscopic, one-celled body which he
had found in the laboratory in the blood of children
and monkeys inoculated against it.
The results of the study were negative, but everything
else about his two weeks on Key West was successful. A large
part of each day he spent at the Army hospital making microscopic
examinations of blood. In the late afternoons he enjoyed play-
ing with the Kean's baby -“that dear little girl,” he called her -
and demonstrating to her admiring parents that, although he had
had little practice in the last ten years, he could still soothe
a fit of weeping with enviable skill. He even learned to eat
mangoes, to the amusement of the Keans, with no more than a little
distaste for their slight turpentine flavor. But the pleasantest
thing of all about the trip was the friendship it developed with
Kean, a cultivated and delightful man who, like Reed, was a pro-
duct of Mr. Abbot's preparatory school and Mr. Jefferson's Univer-
sity.
* * *
Back in Washington again, Reed was busy, as usual. He
occasionally saw Welch, who came to the capital to combat, success-
fully, the anti-vivisection legislation then pending, and other
Hopkins friends who came down on various errands. In May, 1897,
Kean and his wife, on their way to Fort Warren, Boston, stopped
for a few days at Number 5 Cooke Place. Laboratory in-
vestigations, classes, examining boards filled his time. In the
evenings he taught at Columbian University (now George Washington),
or read or wrote or studied Italian, which he was learning so that
182.
casionally he, with his wife, dined with the Sternbergs or some
other friends, or went to the theatre. The children were growing
up: Lawrence was almost twenty, Blossom fourteen. Reed himself
was close to fifty.
The quiet, obscure years were running out. As if to put
a period to their passing, Reed's father died shortly before
Christmas, 1897, in Farmville, the little Appomattox town where
the minister's family had lived forty years earlier. He was an
old man, and he left behind him the pleasant memory of a useful
and unselfish life -such a memory as his youngest son hoped would
survive him at the close of a life of unfaltering service to the
sick and theto science. It would be enough to known that he in his
field, like Pa in his, had been able to accomplish some little
good for humanity.
The eclipse of this humble ambition by the brilliant
climax of his career was an event which no premonition suggested
to the Army doctor. It threw no shadow before it, but now his
fame was almost upon him.
183.
| CHAPTER XVII Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |