January 21, 2023 • 25 mins
This 2014 episode covers Reed’s truly groundbreaking work into the causes and prevention of yellow fever, building on a foundation of other doctors and researchers. His work impacted public health and the American military's ability to work in tropical locations.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello and Happy Saturday. Walter Reid is getting a quick
mentioned in an upcoming episode of the show, so we
thought we would bring out our episode on him as
Today's Saturday Classic. He was a U. S. Army doctor
who did research into diseases like malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever.
This episode originally came out on November Enjoy Welcome to
(00:27):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Ray
Cbe Wilson and I'm Holly Fried. So most people, at
least in the United States have probably at least heard
of Walter Read, if only for the name of the
(00:49):
Army Medical Center before it became kind of notorious due
to a really huge neglect scandal in the late two thousands.
It had previously made a name for itself as the
heart of military medicine in the United States. UM The
Army Medical Center actually closed in twleven and was replaced
by Walter Read National Military Medical Center. So it's probably
(01:12):
a surprise to no one that you know, the major
military medical center in the United States was named for
an Army doctor, and that was Walter Read. Walter Reid
did truly ground breaking work into the causes and prevention
of yellow fever, which was a hugely destructive disease to
the American military and to other militaries and to civilians
(01:36):
outside of the military world um, both within and outside
of the United States. But he really didn't do this
all on his own. His accomplishments really built on a
foundation of other doctors and other researchers. But even so
it had a huge and drastic impact on public health
UH and on the American military's ability to work in
(01:58):
tropical locations which had previously been fraught with all kinds
of health problems. So Walter Reed was born on September
thirteenth of eighteen fifty one to Lemuel Sutton and Faraba
White Reed. Lemuel was a Methodist minister, and Walter had
four older siblings, three brothers and one sister named Laura,
(02:18):
who was the oldest. Because the elder Read was a minister,
the family spent most of Walter's childhood moving from place
to place as the Methodist Church assigned him to different congregations.
Walter's older brothers, two of them Tom and James, fought
for the South during the Civil War, which ran through
Walter's early teenage. Years after the war was over, Lemuel
(02:41):
requested that he be moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. He wanted
his sons to be educated, and living in Charlottesville meant
that they could go to the University of Virginia, and
his request was indeed granted. Unfortunately, though, Walter's mother died
not long after they arrived in Charlottesville, and she was
only forty one at that point, Walter was only fourteen,
(03:02):
and it might have been her death that prompted him
to really throw himself into his studies. He was just
an exceptional student even before he started college. As sort
of a side note, his father also remarried pretty quickly,
and the rest of the family quickly became very fond
of his new wife. Not long after his mother's death, Walter,
(03:23):
now fifteen at this point, started school at the University
of Virginia. Students normally could not enroll until they were sixteen,
but exceptions were made if they had older brothers attending,
and two of Walter's three older brothers were already in
school there. Although it turned out that Walter was the
only one of them to graduate. He originally intended to
(03:44):
study classics, but he soon made the move to the
medical program instead. This actually was largely due to financial
and time reasons. It was faster and thus cheaper to
get an m d than an m A, which probably
seems extremely strange to people who are familiar with how
much it takes to get a medical degree today, and
(04:05):
Walter's medical training touches on a number of previous podcast subjects.
So cadevers used for study were provided to the school
by resurrectionists who stole them from local graveyards, which we
talked about in our episode on the Doctor's Riot, And
like many of the other historical doctors we've talked about,
Walter's first round of medical study included almost no practical
(04:27):
or clinical work. So when he graduated on July one,
eighteen sixty nine, after just two years, and also as
one of the youngest people to do it, he had
to pursue another degree so that he could get more
actual hands on experience being a doctor. And first the
young doctor Reid went to New York, where he enrolled
(04:48):
in Bellevue Hospital Medical College. He got another MD there
in eighteen seventy, and since he'd taken care of most
of his science and medical classes in Virginia. This was
mostly hands on study, and then he went on to
do internships at hospitals around New York. A lot of
reads work during this time was with poor people in
communities that didn't have a lot of medical resources, so
(05:11):
he became increasingly aware of the kinds of diseases that
really caused crises in the world of public health. Typhus, typhoid,
and yellow fever, for example, were all diseases that could
just ravage poor communities, and he started working to understand
all of them. This was particularly true during the four
months he spent working at King's County Hospital in Brooklyn,
(05:33):
New York, in eighteen seventy one, because that was a
facility specifically for the poor. By eighteen seventy three, and
at this point he was only twenty two, Read joined
the Brooklyn Board of Health as an assistant sanitary officer,
and this meant that he was too busy to start
a private practice, and he was still so young that
people didn't really seem to take him seriously. Reid started
(05:56):
a doubt that he would ever be able to make
the kind of change he wanted, since he could not
seemed to get people to respect his knowledge in the
medical field. So seeing that he wasn't going to be
able to make the kinds of strides that he really
wanted to, he eventually decided to join the Army Medical Corps,
which were a multi day multidisciplinary affair in January of
(06:16):
eighteen seventy five. Afterward, he was commissioned as a first
lieutenant at the age of twenty four. And as all
of this uh professional development was going on, Reid had
been courting a woman named Emily Lawrence, primarily through letters.
He had met her while visiting family in Murfresboro, North Carolina,
in eighteen seventy four, and he married her on April
(06:40):
eighteen seventy six. Before he left for Arizona Territory with
the Medical Corps, he actually dinnerd quite a lot about
getting married. He had some worries about what life was
going to be like for the wife of a frontier
army doctor. Um, he just sort of seemed concerned earned
(07:00):
in a lot of ways, and so she had to
do some convincing, including kind of implying that perhaps someone
else was interested in her, so maybe he ought to
get his act together. Um. So, when he did finally
propose it was pretty sudden, he basically proposed, and then
they wedged the wedding into a window of time when
(07:21):
he could actually make it to Murfreysboro to have the ceremony.
The newly weds didn't actually get to live together until
the following November, when Emily met him in San Francisco
after taking a train which was a side note had
some sort of wreck along the way across the country.
And this was just the first of many separations they
would endure due to his work, and they wrote each
(07:42):
other volumes of letters during these times apart. It was
also the first of many adventures in their marriage, because,
as we mentioned earlier, a lot of his early career
in the Medical Corps involved him being a frontier doctor.
He was moved from one post to another, and often
their existence was really difficult and isolated, and a lot
(08:03):
of the hospitals that he worked from were basically temporary
structures meant to sort of serve a temporary need out
on the frontier. They eventually had a son named Walter
Lawrence and a daughter named Emily, who they called Blossom.
Walter sor most likely delivered his son himself, as at
that point they were stationed at for Apache on the frontier.
(08:25):
Also living with them for many years was a young
Native American girl named Susie, who Read had treated for
serious burns after some sort of inter tribal battle. Susie
wound up living with the family for about fifteen years.
She was sort of a combination surrogate daughter and help
around the house. At first, Read was a frontier Army doctor,
(08:47):
as we said, moving from garrison to garrison mostly around
the American West, and these remote outposts did not have
the sorts of facilities or resources that Read needed to
continue his studies of bacteriology and pathology, so he requested
a leave of absence. As Tracy said, a lot of
these facilities were just temporary setups, so they were not
going to have a lab where he could really do
(09:07):
this work. Instead, he ended up transferred to Baltimore at
a couple of points, which allowed him to work at
Johns Hopkins University Hospital Pathology Laboratory. Two really monumental things
happened in Read's life in eight and we're going to
talk about them. After a brief word from a sponsor
(09:35):
to get back to Walter Read, a couple of big things,
as we said before the break changed in his life.
In one George Miller Sternberg became the Surgeon General, and
to the new Surgeon General established the Army Medical school.
I did this kind of discreetly because Congress was reluctant
to spend money in the wake of a financial panic.
(09:57):
That year, Walter was named to the Army Medical Schools faculty.
At this point, Read had been promoted up through the
ranks in the military to major. He was also appointed
to be the curator of the Army Medical Museum and
had become a faculty member at Columbian University, which would
eventually become George Washington University. So after years of moving
(10:19):
from place to place, he and the family went to Washington,
d c. And while he continued to travel for his work,
this put an end to constantly uprooting the family to
go to a new outpost. His early interest in public
health played out in a study of the diseases that
were most problematic to the military. So he studied typhoid, cholera, malaria,
(10:40):
which was still pretty prevalent in the U S at
the time, and yellow fever. In he studied a malaria
outbreak that happened at Fort Myer and at the Washington
Army barracks. It was actually a fair amount of medical
work going on at this time that correctly identified the
cause of laria as a parasite that was spread by mosquitoes.
(11:03):
But you know, the world of information spread being much
uh more limited than it is today, this had not
caught hold everywhere yet, and Read in particular didn't think
that the mosquito was the culprit, in part because he
had spotted a number of errors in the latest paper
that was promoting that connection. Instead, he thought it was
(11:24):
bad air, which is not surprising. A lot of people
thought it was bad air. And the world malaria comes
from Italian terms for bad air. And while he was
definitely on the wrong track, he did dispel the idea
that malaria was water born. He pointed out that healthy
people in Washington were using the same water source as
six soldiers in Fort Meyer and that saw the highest
(11:48):
number of malaria cases in years, even though a water
filtration program was in place. His research wound up looking
at all kinds of factors and found all kinds of
path turns and who got malaria and when. So, even
though he never arrived at the correct conclusion from all
of it, it was useful data to have. The Spanish
(12:10):
American War broke out in and it only went on
for roughly three and a half months, and in the
end the United States had temporary control of Cuba and
had troops station there, But this came with a number
of problems. Cuba's tropical climate was home to several diseases
that US troops had little or no natural resistance to.
(12:31):
Walter Read did extensive work pertaining to two of them,
typhoid and yellow fever. During this period, the Secretary of
War appointed a medical board that he directed to study
diseases that were prevalent on Cuba. The Surgeon General also
established a board specifically to study yellow fever, and for
that board, Read was tapped to be head. He traveled
(12:55):
back and forth between Washington and Cuba several times over
the next several years working with these diseases. UH first
typhoid fever, so not to be confused with typhus, which
is spread by fleas. Typhoid fever is caused by bacteria
Salmonilla typhee, which is spread through feces. Today, there is
a vaccine for it, and it's usually treatable with antibiotics,
(13:17):
but that was not true in the eighteen hundreds. So
typhoid is carried in the stools of infected people and
it's transmitted by contact in one way or another with
those infected stools. So that can mean flies crawling around
on feces and then crawling around on food. It can
also be transmitted when water or milk or are contaminated
(13:40):
with infected feces, and people can continue to spread it
even after they've recovered allah the infamous typhoid Mary. At
this time, the military had huge sanitation procedures in place
to try to prevent the spread of typhoid, but many
of them just weren't effective. They had to do with
cleanliness and disposal of waste, but it's still spread from
(14:03):
one infected person to another. Camps would be relocated entirely
for fear of contaminated water sources, although Reid was definitely
involved in study and trying to come up with plans
for how to prevent the spread of the disease, like
new latrine designs to try to keep the waste away
from other things. The primary researchers on it were Victor
(14:27):
Vaughan and George Sternberg, and unfortunately their work didn't really
get to a satisfactory conclusion. During Red's lifetime. They didn't
manage to wipe out typhoid. It was basically endemic in
the military, and efforts to clean up after it just
were not enough. In the end, vaccines, which were developed
(14:48):
not long after the turn of the century, did a
lot more to stop the disease than all of their
hygiene efforts, which were just not sufficient. In the end,
he took a much greater lead in the fight again
yellow fever, and his work with yellow fever wound up
being a lot more effective than the work of the
team was doing to try to control typhoid. Yellow fever
(15:09):
was a huge problem in Cuba as well as in
parts of the United States. In less tropical parts of
the world, the disease was fairly seasonal, with huge outbreaks
when the weather was warm. It's a hemorrhagic disease that
causes fever, joint pain, vomiting, hemorrhaging, bloodshot eyes, and jaundice.
Yellow fever had two nicknames. One was yellow Jack, which
(15:32):
obviously was because of the jaundice, and the other one
and heads Up. This is gross, was the black vomit,
because in the end stages of the disease, people would
bleed into their digestive systems and then they would throw
that up, and what they threw up was black because
of the enzymes interacting with the blood. One of the
worst parts of the disease was that the symptoms often
(15:54):
cleared up after a few days, which made people think
they were going to survive, but then the symptoms come
back as the liver failed and the internal hemorrhaging started.
It was absolutely horrifying, and the mortality rate was up
to The prevailing theory before Walter Reid really got involved
was that yellow fever was spread by fomites. And if
(16:15):
you've ever played plague, inc You know that these are
external objects that are capable of hanging onto and spreading disease.
So when Native Americans contracted smallpox after being given blankets
that had been used by smallpox patients, the blankets were fomites. However,
some doctors already thought yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes
(16:36):
before Walter Reid got involved. Cuban doctor Carlos Juan Finlay
had first theorized that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes
as early as eighteen eighty one. He did a hundred
and four different experiments between eighteen eighty one and to
study the diseases spread. Most of Finlay's subjects were immigrant
(16:57):
workers who allowed themselves to be bitten by miss eatos
that had bitten yellow fever patients. And it may seem
kind of weird that people would be okay with this
exposure without some kind of other incentive to to make
it more enticing, but yellow fever was so widespread that
pretty much everybody thought if you were in Havana long enough,
you would eventually get it. So a lot of people were, like,
(17:19):
I might as well get it over with and actually
have a doctor nearby if it's going to happen to me,
and like even figured out which specific species he thought
was at risk. This was a common household mosquito that
the time was called q lex fasciatus, and now it's
called adies agyp die, and I hope I have pronounced
that remotely right. But people did not take him seriously.
(17:41):
This was in part because some of his experiments failed.
He thought the mosquito bite was basically akin to a
dirty needle. It was taking infected material from one person
and putting it into another person. He also thought the
sickest patients were going to be the ones most likely
to transmit the disease to the mosquito. So this is
not actually how yellow fever spreads, and we'll talk about
(18:04):
that more in a moment, but that meant that, you know,
a lot of his experiments did not result in somebody
getting yellow fever, and people were sort of like, well,
you're claiming it's the mosquitoes, but the mosquito, but that guy,
he's not sick, so you don't know what you're talking about.
(18:26):
Walter Reid, for his part, worked with a team of
other doctors, including Jesse Lizier, Aristides Eggramante, and James Carroll.
They worked not just off of Finlay's mosquito theory, but
also off of actual mosquito eggs that Finlay had collected.
He'd figured out that if you dried out mosquito eggs,
they would still hatch and mature with the right temperature
(18:47):
and humidity. So using Finlay's harvested mosquito eggs, uh Read
and his team ran a series of experiments. They hatched
the mosquitoes from the eggs, and then they allow them
to bite someone who was infected with yellow fever. This
was an extremely tedious, time consuming process. They would put
the mosquito in a test tube, then put the test
(19:09):
tube mouth down on somebody's skin, and then like wait
for the mosquito to get to biting. Uh. They'd sort
of tap the side of the test tube if the
mosquito was just perched on it not really doing anything.
But really, this is like hurting cats. Mosquitoes do not
feed on people on cue. This reminds me of an
episode of um Why am I blanking Out? On the
(19:33):
name of MythBusters. They were trying to get a skunk
to spray them and they just couldn't. It's kind of
like nature doesn't always do what you want in a
lab like yes. Well, and it will also remind people
of the Saw Bones episode about self experimentation because they
talk about this part in in that episode. If you
are a Sawbones fan, uh. And the team approached this
(19:56):
in a methodical way, as methodical as you can be
well trying to tap on a mosquito to get it
to bite someone, uh, And in a vast departure from
much of the other research that we talked about on
this podcast, they did not use unwilling organs and prisoners
as test subjects. They used volunteers. These people gave their
consent beforehand, and they were compensated for their participation a
(20:16):
hundred dollars just for participating in another and another hundred
dollars if they actually got sick. Um. This was basically
revolutionary in the field of medical research. It's probably the
first time that informed consent became a thing in Western
medical study and research. And through these experiments they discovered
(20:38):
a number of things about yellow fever transmission, including why
some of Finley's experiments failed. It became clear as they
went that mosquitoes could only pick up the virus from
a sick person's blood two or three days after infection,
and it took two weeks of for enough of the
virus to reproduce inside the mosquito for someone it bit
to get sick, So there was an incubation and period
(21:00):
that had not been accounted for, and after that the
mosquito could then spread the disease for a couple of months.
As a side note, this is why mosquitoes don't transmit HIV.
HIV doesn't reproduce inside a mosquito's body. The way yellow
fever does. And this research was overwhelmingly successful, but it
(21:20):
came at a cost. James Carroll, one of the researchers
we mentioned earlier, was infected with yellow fever and he
almost died. And this is reportedly because the mosquito in
question had not eaten in about three days of them
trying to coax it to bite someone, and they were
afraid that if the mosquito starved to death, they were
going to lose important data. So in sort of an
(21:42):
act of just desperation, what reportedly happened is that James
Carroll let it bite him. There's this whole other weird
thing in my head swirling about the idea of trying
to keep mosquitoes as pets, almost for medical research, and
it's very strange to think about um. And Jesse Lizier
was infected with yellow fever and he in fact did die.
(22:04):
It's unclear whether this was part of an experiment or
if this was an accident. Reports are contradictory. Some say
that he did infect himself on purpose, and others say
that he was bitten by a mosquito while working and
thought it was a species that did not carry malaria. Regardless,
his work before his death was absolutely critical to this experiment,
(22:26):
and he left notebooks full of accurate, detailed data when
he died, and without these notebooks the project probably would
have failed. It could not have continued without his knowledge.
Their research did not immediately gain traction. Back in the
United States, an Italian doctor named Giuseppe Cinerelli had theorized
that a basilus caused yellow fever, and even after this
(22:49):
was disproved quite conclusively, he continued to insist that his
basillis be named as the culprit. And this distracted from
the real problem. Yeah, and when we say conclusively disproved,
it involved things like during autopsies of people who had
definitely died of yellow fever, his bacillus was not present,
(23:10):
and we were like, this is not it. But his
advocacy for his bacillus, which it was called his bacillus um,
really sidetrack things. Um. However, soon the army instituted mosquito
control programs and yellow fever rates and Havannah plummeted. The
(23:32):
United States Army was also soon able to get into
areas where they previously couldn't because yellow fever was just
too entrenched. And basically trying to send troops there would
have just caused everyone to get sick and die. An
example is that the building of the Panama Canal really
couldn't have happened without mosquito control programs to control the
(23:52):
spread of yellow fever. Reid came back from Cuba in
one and he continued to lecture on yellow fever. He
received honorary degrees from Harvard and the University of Michigan.
He was named Librarian of the Surgeon General's Library in
November of nineteen o two. Walter Reid died on November
twenty three, nineteen o two, after developing parrotnitis, which followed
(24:15):
a case of appendicitis, and his death came as somewhat
of a shock. At least the illness is severity came
as a shock. His symptoms just weren't as serious as
would have been expected for a case of appendicitis that
was advanced as advanced as his was. So uh when
he became it became clear that he was critically ill.
(24:37):
People were really shocked by it. A vaccine for yellow
fever was developed in the nineteen twenties, and, as we
noted earlier, while to read Army Medical Center was named
for him and for his work. I knew very little
of him prior to this, so I'm glad you picked
this one. Hey so much for joining us on this Saturday.
(25:03):
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at i heart radio dot com. Our old how stuff
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(25:25):
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heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello and Happy Saturday. Walter Reid is getting a quick
mentioned in an upcoming episode of the show, so we
thought we would bring out our episode on him as
Today's Saturday Classic. He was a U. S. Army doctor
who did research into diseases like malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever.
This episode originally came out on November Enjoy Welcome to
(00:27):
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Ray
Cbe Wilson and I'm Holly Fried. So most people, at
least in the United States have probably at least heard
of Walter Read, if only for the name of the
(00:49):
Army Medical Center before it became kind of notorious due
to a really huge neglect scandal in the late two thousands.
It had previously made a name for itself as the
heart of military medicine in the United States. UM The
Army Medical Center actually closed in twleven and was replaced
by Walter Read National Military Medical Center. So it's probably
(01:12):
a surprise to no one that you know, the major
military medical center in the United States was named for
an Army doctor, and that was Walter Read. Walter Reid
did truly ground breaking work into the causes and prevention
of yellow fever, which was a hugely destructive disease to
the American military and to other militaries and to civilians
(01:36):
outside of the military world um, both within and outside
of the United States. But he really didn't do this
all on his own. His accomplishments really built on a
foundation of other doctors and other researchers. But even so
it had a huge and drastic impact on public health
UH and on the American military's ability to work in
(01:58):
tropical locations which had previously been fraught with all kinds
of health problems. So Walter Reed was born on September
thirteenth of eighteen fifty one to Lemuel Sutton and Faraba
White Reed. Lemuel was a Methodist minister, and Walter had
four older siblings, three brothers and one sister named Laura,
(02:18):
who was the oldest. Because the elder Read was a minister,
the family spent most of Walter's childhood moving from place
to place as the Methodist Church assigned him to different congregations.
Walter's older brothers, two of them Tom and James, fought
for the South during the Civil War, which ran through
Walter's early teenage. Years after the war was over, Lemuel
(02:41):
requested that he be moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. He wanted
his sons to be educated, and living in Charlottesville meant
that they could go to the University of Virginia, and
his request was indeed granted. Unfortunately, though, Walter's mother died
not long after they arrived in Charlottesville, and she was
only forty one at that point, Walter was only fourteen,
(03:02):
and it might have been her death that prompted him
to really throw himself into his studies. He was just
an exceptional student even before he started college. As sort
of a side note, his father also remarried pretty quickly,
and the rest of the family quickly became very fond
of his new wife. Not long after his mother's death, Walter,
(03:23):
now fifteen at this point, started school at the University
of Virginia. Students normally could not enroll until they were sixteen,
but exceptions were made if they had older brothers attending,
and two of Walter's three older brothers were already in
school there. Although it turned out that Walter was the
only one of them to graduate. He originally intended to
(03:44):
study classics, but he soon made the move to the
medical program instead. This actually was largely due to financial
and time reasons. It was faster and thus cheaper to
get an m d than an m A, which probably
seems extremely strange to people who are familiar with how
much it takes to get a medical degree today, and
(04:05):
Walter's medical training touches on a number of previous podcast subjects.
So cadevers used for study were provided to the school
by resurrectionists who stole them from local graveyards, which we
talked about in our episode on the Doctor's Riot, And
like many of the other historical doctors we've talked about,
Walter's first round of medical study included almost no practical
(04:27):
or clinical work. So when he graduated on July one,
eighteen sixty nine, after just two years, and also as
one of the youngest people to do it, he had
to pursue another degree so that he could get more
actual hands on experience being a doctor. And first the
young doctor Reid went to New York, where he enrolled
(04:48):
in Bellevue Hospital Medical College. He got another MD there
in eighteen seventy, and since he'd taken care of most
of his science and medical classes in Virginia. This was
mostly hands on study, and then he went on to
do internships at hospitals around New York. A lot of
reads work during this time was with poor people in
communities that didn't have a lot of medical resources, so
(05:11):
he became increasingly aware of the kinds of diseases that
really caused crises in the world of public health. Typhus, typhoid,
and yellow fever, for example, were all diseases that could
just ravage poor communities, and he started working to understand
all of them. This was particularly true during the four
months he spent working at King's County Hospital in Brooklyn,
(05:33):
New York, in eighteen seventy one, because that was a
facility specifically for the poor. By eighteen seventy three, and
at this point he was only twenty two, Read joined
the Brooklyn Board of Health as an assistant sanitary officer,
and this meant that he was too busy to start
a private practice, and he was still so young that
people didn't really seem to take him seriously. Reid started
(05:56):
a doubt that he would ever be able to make
the kind of change he wanted, since he could not
seemed to get people to respect his knowledge in the
medical field. So seeing that he wasn't going to be
able to make the kinds of strides that he really
wanted to, he eventually decided to join the Army Medical Corps,
which were a multi day multidisciplinary affair in January of
(06:16):
eighteen seventy five. Afterward, he was commissioned as a first
lieutenant at the age of twenty four. And as all
of this uh professional development was going on, Reid had
been courting a woman named Emily Lawrence, primarily through letters.
He had met her while visiting family in Murfresboro, North Carolina,
in eighteen seventy four, and he married her on April
(06:40):
eighteen seventy six. Before he left for Arizona Territory with
the Medical Corps, he actually dinnerd quite a lot about
getting married. He had some worries about what life was
going to be like for the wife of a frontier
army doctor. Um, he just sort of seemed concerned earned
(07:00):
in a lot of ways, and so she had to
do some convincing, including kind of implying that perhaps someone
else was interested in her, so maybe he ought to
get his act together. Um. So, when he did finally
propose it was pretty sudden, he basically proposed, and then
they wedged the wedding into a window of time when
(07:21):
he could actually make it to Murfreysboro to have the ceremony.
The newly weds didn't actually get to live together until
the following November, when Emily met him in San Francisco
after taking a train which was a side note had
some sort of wreck along the way across the country.
And this was just the first of many separations they
would endure due to his work, and they wrote each
(07:42):
other volumes of letters during these times apart. It was
also the first of many adventures in their marriage, because,
as we mentioned earlier, a lot of his early career
in the Medical Corps involved him being a frontier doctor.
He was moved from one post to another, and often
their existence was really difficult and isolated, and a lot
(08:03):
of the hospitals that he worked from were basically temporary
structures meant to sort of serve a temporary need out
on the frontier. They eventually had a son named Walter
Lawrence and a daughter named Emily, who they called Blossom.
Walter sor most likely delivered his son himself, as at
that point they were stationed at for Apache on the frontier.
(08:25):
Also living with them for many years was a young
Native American girl named Susie, who Read had treated for
serious burns after some sort of inter tribal battle. Susie
wound up living with the family for about fifteen years.
She was sort of a combination surrogate daughter and help
around the house. At first, Read was a frontier Army doctor,
(08:47):
as we said, moving from garrison to garrison mostly around
the American West, and these remote outposts did not have
the sorts of facilities or resources that Read needed to
continue his studies of bacteriology and pathology, so he requested
a leave of absence. As Tracy said, a lot of
these facilities were just temporary setups, so they were not
going to have a lab where he could really do
(09:07):
this work. Instead, he ended up transferred to Baltimore at
a couple of points, which allowed him to work at
Johns Hopkins University Hospital Pathology Laboratory. Two really monumental things
happened in Read's life in eight and we're going to
talk about them. After a brief word from a sponsor
(09:35):
to get back to Walter Read, a couple of big things,
as we said before the break changed in his life.
In one George Miller Sternberg became the Surgeon General, and
to the new Surgeon General established the Army Medical school.
I did this kind of discreetly because Congress was reluctant
to spend money in the wake of a financial panic.
(09:57):
That year, Walter was named to the Army Medical Schools faculty.
At this point, Read had been promoted up through the
ranks in the military to major. He was also appointed
to be the curator of the Army Medical Museum and
had become a faculty member at Columbian University, which would
eventually become George Washington University. So after years of moving
(10:19):
from place to place, he and the family went to Washington,
d c. And while he continued to travel for his work,
this put an end to constantly uprooting the family to
go to a new outpost. His early interest in public
health played out in a study of the diseases that
were most problematic to the military. So he studied typhoid, cholera, malaria,
(10:40):
which was still pretty prevalent in the U S at
the time, and yellow fever. In he studied a malaria
outbreak that happened at Fort Myer and at the Washington
Army barracks. It was actually a fair amount of medical
work going on at this time that correctly identified the
cause of laria as a parasite that was spread by mosquitoes.
(11:03):
But you know, the world of information spread being much
uh more limited than it is today, this had not
caught hold everywhere yet, and Read in particular didn't think
that the mosquito was the culprit, in part because he
had spotted a number of errors in the latest paper
that was promoting that connection. Instead, he thought it was
(11:24):
bad air, which is not surprising. A lot of people
thought it was bad air. And the world malaria comes
from Italian terms for bad air. And while he was
definitely on the wrong track, he did dispel the idea
that malaria was water born. He pointed out that healthy
people in Washington were using the same water source as
six soldiers in Fort Meyer and that saw the highest
(11:48):
number of malaria cases in years, even though a water
filtration program was in place. His research wound up looking
at all kinds of factors and found all kinds of
path turns and who got malaria and when. So, even
though he never arrived at the correct conclusion from all
of it, it was useful data to have. The Spanish
(12:10):
American War broke out in and it only went on
for roughly three and a half months, and in the
end the United States had temporary control of Cuba and
had troops station there, But this came with a number
of problems. Cuba's tropical climate was home to several diseases
that US troops had little or no natural resistance to.
(12:31):
Walter Read did extensive work pertaining to two of them,
typhoid and yellow fever. During this period, the Secretary of
War appointed a medical board that he directed to study
diseases that were prevalent on Cuba. The Surgeon General also
established a board specifically to study yellow fever, and for
that board, Read was tapped to be head. He traveled
(12:55):
back and forth between Washington and Cuba several times over
the next several years working with these diseases. UH first
typhoid fever, so not to be confused with typhus, which
is spread by fleas. Typhoid fever is caused by bacteria
Salmonilla typhee, which is spread through feces. Today, there is
a vaccine for it, and it's usually treatable with antibiotics,
(13:17):
but that was not true in the eighteen hundreds. So
typhoid is carried in the stools of infected people and
it's transmitted by contact in one way or another with
those infected stools. So that can mean flies crawling around
on feces and then crawling around on food. It can
also be transmitted when water or milk or are contaminated
(13:40):
with infected feces, and people can continue to spread it
even after they've recovered allah the infamous typhoid Mary. At
this time, the military had huge sanitation procedures in place
to try to prevent the spread of typhoid, but many
of them just weren't effective. They had to do with
cleanliness and disposal of waste, but it's still spread from
(14:03):
one infected person to another. Camps would be relocated entirely
for fear of contaminated water sources, although Reid was definitely
involved in study and trying to come up with plans
for how to prevent the spread of the disease, like
new latrine designs to try to keep the waste away
from other things. The primary researchers on it were Victor
(14:27):
Vaughan and George Sternberg, and unfortunately their work didn't really
get to a satisfactory conclusion. During Red's lifetime. They didn't
manage to wipe out typhoid. It was basically endemic in
the military, and efforts to clean up after it just
were not enough. In the end, vaccines, which were developed
(14:48):
not long after the turn of the century, did a
lot more to stop the disease than all of their
hygiene efforts, which were just not sufficient. In the end,
he took a much greater lead in the fight again
yellow fever, and his work with yellow fever wound up
being a lot more effective than the work of the
team was doing to try to control typhoid. Yellow fever
(15:09):
was a huge problem in Cuba as well as in
parts of the United States. In less tropical parts of
the world, the disease was fairly seasonal, with huge outbreaks
when the weather was warm. It's a hemorrhagic disease that
causes fever, joint pain, vomiting, hemorrhaging, bloodshot eyes, and jaundice.
Yellow fever had two nicknames. One was yellow Jack, which
(15:32):
obviously was because of the jaundice, and the other one
and heads Up. This is gross, was the black vomit,
because in the end stages of the disease, people would
bleed into their digestive systems and then they would throw
that up, and what they threw up was black because
of the enzymes interacting with the blood. One of the
worst parts of the disease was that the symptoms often
(15:54):
cleared up after a few days, which made people think
they were going to survive, but then the symptoms come
back as the liver failed and the internal hemorrhaging started.
It was absolutely horrifying, and the mortality rate was up
to The prevailing theory before Walter Reid really got involved
was that yellow fever was spread by fomites. And if
(16:15):
you've ever played plague, inc You know that these are
external objects that are capable of hanging onto and spreading disease.
So when Native Americans contracted smallpox after being given blankets
that had been used by smallpox patients, the blankets were fomites. However,
some doctors already thought yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes
(16:36):
before Walter Reid got involved. Cuban doctor Carlos Juan Finlay
had first theorized that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes
as early as eighteen eighty one. He did a hundred
and four different experiments between eighteen eighty one and to
study the diseases spread. Most of Finlay's subjects were immigrant
(16:57):
workers who allowed themselves to be bitten by miss eatos
that had bitten yellow fever patients. And it may seem
kind of weird that people would be okay with this
exposure without some kind of other incentive to to make
it more enticing, but yellow fever was so widespread that
pretty much everybody thought if you were in Havana long enough,
you would eventually get it. So a lot of people were, like,
(17:19):
I might as well get it over with and actually
have a doctor nearby if it's going to happen to me,
and like even figured out which specific species he thought
was at risk. This was a common household mosquito that
the time was called q lex fasciatus, and now it's
called adies agyp die, and I hope I have pronounced
that remotely right. But people did not take him seriously.
(17:41):
This was in part because some of his experiments failed.
He thought the mosquito bite was basically akin to a
dirty needle. It was taking infected material from one person
and putting it into another person. He also thought the
sickest patients were going to be the ones most likely
to transmit the disease to the mosquito. So this is
not actually how yellow fever spreads, and we'll talk about
(18:04):
that more in a moment, but that meant that, you know,
a lot of his experiments did not result in somebody
getting yellow fever, and people were sort of like, well,
you're claiming it's the mosquitoes, but the mosquito, but that guy,
he's not sick, so you don't know what you're talking about.
(18:26):
Walter Reid, for his part, worked with a team of
other doctors, including Jesse Lizier, Aristides Eggramante, and James Carroll.
They worked not just off of Finlay's mosquito theory, but
also off of actual mosquito eggs that Finlay had collected.
He'd figured out that if you dried out mosquito eggs,
they would still hatch and mature with the right temperature
(18:47):
and humidity. So using Finlay's harvested mosquito eggs, uh Read
and his team ran a series of experiments. They hatched
the mosquitoes from the eggs, and then they allow them
to bite someone who was infected with yellow fever. This
was an extremely tedious, time consuming process. They would put
the mosquito in a test tube, then put the test
(19:09):
tube mouth down on somebody's skin, and then like wait
for the mosquito to get to biting. Uh. They'd sort
of tap the side of the test tube if the
mosquito was just perched on it not really doing anything.
But really, this is like hurting cats. Mosquitoes do not
feed on people on cue. This reminds me of an
episode of um Why am I blanking Out? On the
(19:33):
name of MythBusters. They were trying to get a skunk
to spray them and they just couldn't. It's kind of
like nature doesn't always do what you want in a
lab like yes. Well, and it will also remind people
of the Saw Bones episode about self experimentation because they
talk about this part in in that episode. If you
are a Sawbones fan, uh. And the team approached this
(19:56):
in a methodical way, as methodical as you can be
well trying to tap on a mosquito to get it
to bite someone, uh, And in a vast departure from
much of the other research that we talked about on
this podcast, they did not use unwilling organs and prisoners
as test subjects. They used volunteers. These people gave their
consent beforehand, and they were compensated for their participation a
(20:16):
hundred dollars just for participating in another and another hundred
dollars if they actually got sick. Um. This was basically
revolutionary in the field of medical research. It's probably the
first time that informed consent became a thing in Western
medical study and research. And through these experiments they discovered
(20:38):
a number of things about yellow fever transmission, including why
some of Finley's experiments failed. It became clear as they
went that mosquitoes could only pick up the virus from
a sick person's blood two or three days after infection,
and it took two weeks of for enough of the
virus to reproduce inside the mosquito for someone it bit
to get sick, So there was an incubation and period
(21:00):
that had not been accounted for, and after that the
mosquito could then spread the disease for a couple of months.
As a side note, this is why mosquitoes don't transmit HIV.
HIV doesn't reproduce inside a mosquito's body. The way yellow
fever does. And this research was overwhelmingly successful, but it
(21:20):
came at a cost. James Carroll, one of the researchers
we mentioned earlier, was infected with yellow fever and he
almost died. And this is reportedly because the mosquito in
question had not eaten in about three days of them
trying to coax it to bite someone, and they were
afraid that if the mosquito starved to death, they were
going to lose important data. So in sort of an
(21:42):
act of just desperation, what reportedly happened is that James
Carroll let it bite him. There's this whole other weird
thing in my head swirling about the idea of trying
to keep mosquitoes as pets, almost for medical research, and
it's very strange to think about um. And Jesse Lizier
was infected with yellow fever and he in fact did die.
(22:04):
It's unclear whether this was part of an experiment or
if this was an accident. Reports are contradictory. Some say
that he did infect himself on purpose, and others say
that he was bitten by a mosquito while working and
thought it was a species that did not carry malaria. Regardless,
his work before his death was absolutely critical to this experiment,
(22:26):
and he left notebooks full of accurate, detailed data when
he died, and without these notebooks the project probably would
have failed. It could not have continued without his knowledge.
Their research did not immediately gain traction. Back in the
United States, an Italian doctor named Giuseppe Cinerelli had theorized
that a basilus caused yellow fever, and even after this
(22:49):
was disproved quite conclusively, he continued to insist that his
basillis be named as the culprit. And this distracted from
the real problem. Yeah, and when we say conclusively disproved,
it involved things like during autopsies of people who had
definitely died of yellow fever, his bacillus was not present,
(23:10):
and we were like, this is not it. But his
advocacy for his bacillus, which it was called his bacillus um,
really sidetrack things. Um. However, soon the army instituted mosquito
control programs and yellow fever rates and Havannah plummeted. The
(23:32):
United States Army was also soon able to get into
areas where they previously couldn't because yellow fever was just
too entrenched. And basically trying to send troops there would
have just caused everyone to get sick and die. An
example is that the building of the Panama Canal really
couldn't have happened without mosquito control programs to control the
(23:52):
spread of yellow fever. Reid came back from Cuba in
one and he continued to lecture on yellow fever. He
received honorary degrees from Harvard and the University of Michigan.
He was named Librarian of the Surgeon General's Library in
November of nineteen o two. Walter Reid died on November
twenty three, nineteen o two, after developing parrotnitis, which followed
(24:15):
a case of appendicitis, and his death came as somewhat
of a shock. At least the illness is severity came
as a shock. His symptoms just weren't as serious as
would have been expected for a case of appendicitis that
was advanced as advanced as his was. So uh when
he became it became clear that he was critically ill.
(24:37):
People were really shocked by it. A vaccine for yellow
fever was developed in the nineteen twenties, and, as we
noted earlier, while to read Army Medical Center was named
for him and for his work. I knew very little
of him prior to this, so I'm glad you picked
this one. Hey so much for joining us on this Saturday.
(25:03):
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
heard an email address or Facebook U r L or
something similar over the course of the show, that could
be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast
at i heart radio dot com. Our old how stuff
Works email address no longer works, and you can find
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(25:25):
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