University of Virginia Library

24. CHAPTER XXIV

Invitations to read papers on yellow fever before medical
societies, a dinner in his honor given by the Medical and Chirur-
gical Faculty of the State of Maryland, congratulations from
friends and colleagues and strangers, general acclaim -therse were
the things that met Reed on his return to the United States. Popsy
Welch, bursting with pride in his student's achievement, was of the
opinion that Reed's researches in yellow fever were the most impor-
tant contribution to medicine ever made in this country, with the
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exception of the discovery of anaesthesia. The praise was not ex-
travagant. Modest although he was, Reed could not have been sur-
prised: he appreciated very well the meaning of the work he had
directed.

“You lucky man!” Sternberg greeted him feelingly.

“If you hadn't been the Surgeon General, if the military gover-
nor of hadn't backed us to the limit morally and financially, if
Kean and the other medical officers hadn't cooperated so generously,
if we hadn't had a number of breave volunteers, if -well,” Reed
returned the warm hand clasp, “we have so much, so much, to be
thankful for. We were very fortunate.”

"Self-effacing, he smilingly declined to let the newspapers
take his picture. “Fools' names and fools' faces, you know, little
daughter,” he told Blossom.

But when one of his students, thrilled with a new
camera, coaxed him to pose, he yielded.

“Oh, all right,” he agreed laughing. “Just for practice.”

They went up on the museum roof. Reed smoothed his uniform
coat, straightened his collar and patted his hair flat with his hands.

“Is this all right?” he inquired, looking into the camera.

The young man adjusted him to the light. “Look across bmy
right shoulder, sir,” he directed him. “A little more this way -
that's fine. Hold it!” He squeezed the bulb. Reed's image was
committed to the sensitive plate. That was his last photograph.

He was pleased by the recognition he received for his work -
an M. A. from Harvard in the summer of 1902, and LL. D. from the Uni-
versity of Michigan a little later -more pleased by the results al-
ready apparent in Cuba. Gorgas, at first unconvinced that Culex
275.

fasciatus was the only agent that spread yellow fever, had been con-
verted when his own mosquito control measures made Havana totally
free of the disease for the first time in more than two centuries.
Already the research was paying dividends in lives and money.

Not content to rest on his accomplishment, Reed worked as
hard as ever. His life returned naturally into its accustomed
groove, and he continued, too, with Carroll to do yellow fever re-
search.

His children were grown. Blossom, happy to have her favor-
ite companion back again, still came to meet him in the evenings at
the corner where he got off the horse car. Lawrence, at the prom-
ising beginning of his military career, had married one of the Black-
ford girls, Landon, and in the usual Army routine was being moved
from post to post.

Reed was delighted when Kean was transferred to Washington in
September, 1902, and persuaded him to move into the apartment house
on Nineteenth Street near Q, where the Reed family then lived.

“But it's so expensive here!” Kean complained. “Isn't there
some cheaper section of town where I can live?”

“Kean,” Reed explained, smiling, “there are three things every
Army officer hads to do: he has to live north of Pennsylvania Avenue
and west of Fourteenth Street; he has to have a charge account at
Woodward and Lothrop; and he has to keep his money at the Riggs Bank.
You might just as well reconcile yourself to it now.”

Kean, seeing Reed frequently at home and at work, noticed that
he seemed tired, and once or twice heard him refer, lightly, to his
indigestion. It occurred to no one, however, that he was seriously
ill. He continued his usual duties and received, in addition, the
appointment as Librarian of the Surgeon General's Library on Novem-
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ber 1st, 1902. Mental exertion, however, was becoming strangely
painful to the alert mind that had always before approached it so
buoyantly; and the heavy schedule of teaching and research had
seemed unbearably taxing to him when he came back in the fall to
resume it after a rest at his little mountain home near Monterey,
Pennsylvania.

Characteristically, however, he exerted himself to maintain
his usual urbanity and cheerfulness -no one should be distressed
on his account if he could help it -but he was unable to conceal
his suddenly falling strength from his wife. Finally, he consulted
his doctor, Major W. C. Borden.

When, on November 17th, Borden removed his ruptured appendix,
it was already too late. Reed could not rally. The doctor whose
brilliant work had saved humanity from a cruel plague could
not himself be saved. At the Washington Barracks hospital, where
he had brought so many times brought healing and comfort to others,
early in the dark morning of November 23rd, Walter Reed quietly died.

The stone that marks his grave, on a high knoll in Arlington
National Cemetery, is, fittingly, simple. On it is inscribed the
citation pronounced by President Eliot of Harvard University in con-
ferring on him the degree of Master of Arts:

“He gave to man control over that dreadful scourge, yellow
fever.”

277.

EPILOGUE

William Crawford Gorgas hasd responded to Reed's con-
gratulations on his success in stamping out yellow fever in Havana
by saying, “I am very happy to serve in the more humble role of
being the first to put your discovery to extensive, practical ap-
plication.”

Gorgas' own name took on independent luster when, applying
Reed's discovery on a larger scale, he brought yellow fever and
malaria under control in the Canal Zone, and thus made possible
the building of the Canal by Americans after disease had forced
the French to abandon it as a costly failure. Modest like Reed
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and generous, Gorgas, when lauded as a great man for this work,
disclaimed the praise. “Not a great man,” he said, “merely one
who is trying to follow in the footsteps of a great man, Walter
Reed.”

Reed's memory is one of which the United States Army is proud.
Its medical center in Washington, built while George Torney -the
same George Torney who had urged Reed to join the Army -was Sur-
geon General, is named the Walter Reed Memorial Hospital. The
Army Register publishes annually a Roll of Honor contain-
ing the names of the Yellow Fever Commission and of the American
volunteers whose interest and courage made the experiments possible.
The name of Walter Reed stands first on the list.

Congress, briefly mindful of the country's debt to the sol-
dier whose work saved countless lives that would otherwise have
been sacrificed to yellow fever, shortly after his death granted
Mrs. Reed a modest pension. Reed's associates in the experimentswork
it forgot, except for a niggardly pittance here and there, until
1929, when it granted the survivors and the widows of those who had
died the same pension as Mrs. Reed, and a gold medal. MostAll of the
brave young men who submitted to the yellow fever experiments are
elderly now, and lost in undeserved obscurity, or dead: and Agra-
monte and Carroll, too, are dead.

Mrs. Reed, now a very old woman, still lives, like her son
and daughter, in Washington. Aside from his wife and children, the
only near relative who survives Reed is his half-sister, Annie, now
Mrs. D. T. Elam, of Farmville, Virginia.

* * *

The search for the specific agent of yellow fever is not yet
ended. Before Reed's death, Carroll, working in Cuba, strained in-
279.

fected blood through a filter fine enough to catch the smallest
known bacteria. Injecting the serum thus obtained into non-im-
munes, he produced yellow fever. This experiment explained
at last why the microscopic examination of the blood, pursued so
painstakingly by Sternberg, Reed's board and other workers, had
had negative results: the agent is sub-microscopic, a filterable
virus. The volunteers who submitted to this experiment were
John R. Bullard, Albert W. Govington and Paul Hamann, whose names
appear on the Roll of Honor.

Our knowledge of any subject, no matter how wide, can al-
ways be extended. With the discovery in 1927 of the suscepti-
bility of certain monkeys -among them the rhesus (the one the
board tried to infect must have been, by the unluckiest chance,
immune) -a new era in yellow fever research opened, and by 1931
the yellow fever vaccine was developed, the most important piece
of yellow fever work since Walter Reed's experiments thirty years
before.

The original and permanent home of yellow fever is the Con-
go region in Africa. Recent investigations have established, also,
that it persists in certain rural and jungle areas of South Amer-
ica in endemic form, even in the absence of Aedes aegypti, as
Culex fasciatus is now called. It is thought that this jungle
fever, maintained by man and probably by other animals and spread
possibly by several kinds of mosquitoes, is the source of the
plagues that used to afflict cities before Reed's researches
pointed the way to the control of epidemics. Scientists, inspired
like Walter Reed by the hope of eliminating the disease through-
out the whole world, are continuing the work which he
so notably launched.

280.