The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our Nation (15 page)

“Do not move,” Vaughan whispered. “If you must drink the ginger ale, call the orderly and have him pull the stopper. Your heart is crippled and a change in position may kill you.”

The man laughed, rising from the bed, and then fell dead across Vaughan, breaking the cot beneath them. Vaughan called for the orderly, and the body was removed.

Another day, a yellow fever patient bribed an orderly to bring him solid food when he was under orders not to eat. He died within a few hours of the meal. Though his hunger grew intense, Vaughan adhered to his liquid diet of warm lemonade. He also suffered from delusions, believing that he was at once the patient and at other times just observing the patient—a “double consciousness,” he called it.

His temperature climbed toward 106, and he watched the clouds gather over the Sierras. He began to see gods and demons standing on the mountaintop. The clouds grew wilder and thicker, eclipsing the sun and swallowing the world. Each day, those lightning storms and clouds gathered in the mind of Victor Vaughan, until finally, they parted and disappeared suddenly and completely. Vaughan’s fever had broken, though he was now sixty pounds lighter and considerably weaker.

His superior officer prepared orders to send him home by transport, but Vaughan refused, arguing that his new immune statuswould enable him to do even greater work in the hospitals in Cuba. Rather than simply order Vaughan to return, the officer instead told Vaughan to stay as long as he liked and set up a tent for him—just a few feet away from the mess hall. Vaughan could smell the food from the mess, and several times he attempted to get out of his cot and walk there. He was too weak to manage even the short distance and had to crawl on his hands and knees. Vaughan’s superior officer visited him every hour.

“Tomorrow morning a transport leaves for the United States with convalescent soldiers, and I haven’t a doctor to send with them,” complained the officer. “I do not know what to do.” It was a thoughtful and effective tactic.

“Major, do you want me to go on that transport?” Vaughan asked.

Without answering, the superior officer called to a captain, “Bring a stretcher with bearers and put Vaughan on the transport.” On the long journey home, Vaughan recovered fully from his bout with yellow fever.

Victor Vaughan arrived back in New York in August of 1898, where orders from Surgeon General Sternberg awaited him. He would be part of the Typhoid Commission to investigate disease rampant among the American camps, and the head of the board would be Major Walter Reed.

An Unlikely Hero

Walter Reed wore immortality modestly. He had a moustache, long and ribbonlike, on an otherwise boyish face. He referred to his wife and daughter with gushing pet names and had a habit of rubbing his palms together when pleased about something. His favorite drink was mint julep, though he was a minister’s son who could recite Scripture flawlessly. His lanky build belied a posture spent crooked over a microscope. His narrow, gray eyes were earnest, his brow creased with age. He looked more like a physician than a soldier, which is probably how he liked it since he preferred the men under his command to call him doctor, rather than major. Still, Reed was the type of army man and physician always in uniform and always within code; throughout his life he would write the word
duty
with a capital D. His favorite poet was Sir Walter Scott, the poet of chivalry and honor. If any pride or egotism existed within him, it did so far beneath an exterior of humility—his brother Christopher once remarked about him that every modest man is not great, but it is equally true that every great man is modest.

That Walter Reed’s name would survive among the greatest names in medical history would certainly have come as a shock to him had he lived long enough to learn of it.

Reed was born September 13, 1851, in a small, milk-white cabin in Gloucester County, Virginia, to a Methodist minister named Lemuel Sutton Reed and a mother named Pharaba White Reed. The cabin was on loan to the family after the parsonage burned shortly before their arrival, so Pharaba gave birth to her youngest child in a two-room cabin cradled by an elm tree.

Both Lemuel and Pharaba came from colonial families out of North Carolina, their heritage rich in self-reliance, inventiveness and fairness, traits that were fast becoming the trademarks of American ingenuity and success. In this new world, there was no sense of entitlement or aristocracy; determination and hard work were the blueprints for achievement. Pharaba’s finest attributes surfaced in Reed, even at a young age. Aside from her fair hair and blue eyes, Reed inherited her intelligence, vivacity, sharp wit and a love of gardening. He would follow his mother around the garden, imitating her, as she pruned the cornflowers, roses and larkspur. It was a passionate hobby he carried with him during his nomadic years in the army.

As a “circuit rider,” Reed’s father moved every two years throughout Virginia, wherever Methodist churches were in need of a new minister. Ministers of small towns maintained a certain celebrity and power over parishioners, and with it came social responsibility. Towns would wait to see if the new minister would tolerate dancing, drinking. Would he be a strong speaker? Would his family set the right example? Receiving very little pay, ministers and their families relied heavily upon their philanthropic neighbors. Reed may not have taken so well to the evangelical lifestyle though; he would not officially join the Methodist Church until he was a teenager. He joined the day his mother died. And, years later, when his son, Lawrence, was in school, Reed was incensed to learn of a Methodist revival there: “I don’t approve of such things for Children,” he wrote. “My boy hasn’t done anything that he should be told that he is lost since and in danger of hell-fire.”

During the 1850s, Virginia breathed promise in her verdant landscape, still largely made up of tightly knit farm communities. For a young boy, there could be little else to worry about but hiding among the languid leaves of tobacco plants, playing with siblings, and studies in the one-room schoolhouse. Then war came.

As “Lee’s Miserables,” as the troops came to be known, waged a losing war, Union soldiers swarmed into Virginia, toward Richmond. The sound of cannons trembled in the night air, smoke garlanding above the farmland. For Virginians, it meant food shortages, rationing, ruined farmland, failed crops. War pierced the general calm of the Reed household as well when Reed’s two oldest brothers enlisted. At Antietam, a cannonball struck his brother James. In a crude hospital tent, the surgeon amputated James’s hand. He returned home like so many of his peers, physically clipped and psychologically broken.

Though the battlefield proved treacherous during the Civil War, disease was the greatest enemy. An estimated two-thirds of Union and Confederate soldiers died of disease, not wounds. Yellow fever was one of the most deadly. With this in mind, one of history’s more famous examples of germ warfare surfaced. Dr. Luke Pryor Blackburn of Kentucky, known as “Dr. Black Vomit,” attempted to ship infected clothing from yellow fever victims to major northern cities. He also had plans to poison New York’s water supply, as well as burn the city. He then turned his attention to assassination, sending trunks of clothes from the yellow fever wards to President Lincoln in hopes of giving him a lethal dose of the fever. Again, his attempts were unsuccessful thanks to ignorance about how the disease was spread. His criminal efforts did little to harm his career, however. After the war, Dr. Blackburn continued to practice medicine and aided victims during the 1878 epidemic in Memphis. In the following years, he would become the governor of Kentucky.

A good student, Reed attended school every year except one during the height of the Civil War. He drank knowledge. Not born to privilege, he was equipped instead with other tools for success— lofty principles and swelling determination. As his older brothers finished their schooling, Reed’s father asked the Methodist Church if he might move to Charlottesville to minister and allow his boys to attend the university.

Walter Reed was fourteen when the family moved to Charlottesville, on the cusp of the Shenandoah Mountains. Charlottesville rattled with traffic along the cobblestone streets. Churches and storefronts lined the walks. The town even had its own daily paper. It was here that the Reed brothers entered Mr. Jefferson’s university; the school made an exception in allowing Walter Reed to begin at age fifteen because his elder brothers were also in attendance.

As a boy, Reed was thin boned, determination and conviction visible on his face. His cheekbones were high, his eyes set close to one another and his brow narrow, so that he had a look of steadfast concern that would stay with him well into adulthood. But it was not his physical appearance that people noticed. People took to his gracious and well-mannered nature. He was honest and likable, and that left a marked impression.

Reed appeared before the board at the University of Virginia with an erect posture, chin set forward, trying to look older than his age. Reed had two older brothers at the university, and his father would not be able to afford the remainder of Walter Reed’s education. To earn a master of arts degree, a student completed studies in eight different departments ranging from Latin and Greek to mathematics. Reed had only finished courses in Latin, Greek and history and literature—he was far short of the requirements for an M.A. degree. Reed asked permission to attain a degree in medicine instead. True to the time period, an M.D. could be earned more easily and in less time than an M.A. The board considered his request impossible, so they gave their consent. They made a gentleman’s agreement on the deal. Should this boy with only one year of university experience pass the medical examination, the school would allow him to graduate with a degree in medicine.

Reed studied for nine months, taking courses in anatomy, chemistry, pharmacy, surgery, among others, and slept only three or four hours a night. At the end of the term, he passed the examination, and the board kept their promise. Walter Reed remains the youngest graduate of the University of Virginia’s medical school—he was seventeen years old.

Following his graduation, Walter Reed moved to Brooklyn with his brother, Christopher, an attorney who wanted to practice law in New York where he would never run out of clients. For Reed, New York represented the best in medicine—its hospitals highly regarded and its many citizens in need of help. It was not, however,an easy choice for either brother to make as southerners. A mere four years since a war still bitterly fresh in the minds of both sides, the North felt like enemy territory.

Reed earned his second medical degree from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the premier teaching hospital at the time. Because he was only eighteen years old, Bellevue withheld his degree until he was twenty-one. At Bellevue, Reed had his first opportunity to use a microscope, as well as a thermometer—measuring ten inches long and taking five minutes for a reading. Medical studies at that time were still very crude. Cadavers were not preserved well, so doctors often kept handkerchiefs over their mouths while working. The stethoscope had been around for only fifty years. Disease prevention was unheard of. Links between sanitation and illness had not yet been realized.

Reed continued to practice medicine in Brooklyn and New York, as well as serving on the Brooklyn Board of Health as a sanitary officer. New York City teemed with immigrants after the Civil War. For the first time, Reed met Italians, Irish, Asians, Germans. With the mass immigration came new epidemics, which spread rapidly among the conditions of filth and poor nutrition in the city. Reed was assigned as district physician to the poorest district in New York. Many of his patients included the destitute “squatters” who lived in colonies in Central Park.

Growing up in Virginia, Reed lived mostly among farms, his family dependent upon the goodwill of parishioners for extra provisions. Neighbors helped one another. Never had he seen real urban poverty and the self-serving individualism that accompanied it. He was appalled by the unsanitary living conditions and poor medical attention given to lower classes in the cities. His anguish over their pitiable circumstances and the epidemics that routinely rained over the communities planted in him a desire—and later an obsession—to do something toward the improvement of humanity. In order to wage such a war, you have to identify the enemy, and Reed found his: disease, filth and poverty.

One night he returned home to the apartment he shared with Christopher. Walter Reed stood for a long time at the dark window, his silhouette backlit by gas lamps. He thought his brother was sleeping as he stared out the black glass and said quietly: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin, woe unto thee, Bethsaida, for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sion, they would long ago have repented in sackcloth and ashes.” The brothers never spoke of it; as Christopher later explained, “There are some things too sacred for the invasion of words.”

On a trip to North Carolina where his family now lived, Reed met his wife, Emilie Lawrence, the daughter of a prominent planter. Emilie, who changed the spelling from
Emily
to be more elegant, was pretty, though not conventionally beautiful. She had a long, straight nose, honey-colored hair and lean lips. Reed wrote of Emilie’s “beauty of character, your womanly worth, the purity of your Christianity, the charm of your intellect.”

“Should you spurn my affection,” he wrote to her, “I should never be ashamed of having revealed my love to so noble a woman.”

It was upon meeting Emilie that Reed’s work in New York lost its luster once and for all. He wrote to her that if he “could find some fair damsel, who was foolish enough to trust me, I think I would get—married, and settle down to sober work for the rest of my days in some small city where one could enjoy the advantages of a city and at the same time not feel as if lost.”