Walter Reed

His father rode a Methodist circuit in Virginia, and when he was away preaching the family stayed with his mother's people at Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Reed was the fifth child of that marriage. He enrolled at the University of Virginia, and after two years took an M.D. in 1869, two months short of his 18th birthday, still the youngest the university has ever granted. A second M.D. followed at Bellevue in New York in 1870. He interned around the city and worked for the New York Board of Health until 1875, and found that his age cost him standing and the city bored him. In 1875 he sat a 30-hour examination for the Army Medical Corps and passed. He married Emily Lawrence the following April and took her west.

Sixteen years of frontier postings followed. He was responsible for soldiers, their families, and at one point several hundred Apaches, Geronimo among them, and watched what epidemics did to a garrison. On a late tour he took advanced work in pathology and bacteriology at the Johns Hopkins hospital laboratory. In 1893 he joined the faculty of the new Army Medical School and George Washington University and became curator of the Army Medical Museum. In 1896 he showed that yellow fever among enlisted men near the Potomac tracked their night walks through swampy woods, not the river water. A board he chaired in 1898 traced a typhoid epidemic to fecal contact and to flies on food. In May 1900 the Surgeon General, George Miller Sternberg, put him over a four-man commission in Cuba with James Carroll, Jesse Lazear and Aristides Agramonte.

The commission worked on human beings. Lazear let an infected mosquito bite him on purpose. On September 8, 1900, he wrote to his wife that he rather thought he was on the track of the real germ, and 17 days later he was dead of yellow fever at 34. The deliberate act was covered up at the time, possibly over family insurance, and the story given out was that he had mistaken the insect. Philip Hench found the truth in Lazear's own notebook in 1947. Carroll infected himself too, survived, and died seven years later of the heart damage it left. Reed then drafted consent documents — the Yellow Fever Commission is reckoned the first research group in history to use them. Three survive, in Spanish with English translations. Two carry a signature. One is marked with an X.

His appendix ruptured in 1902 and the peritonitis killed him on November 23, at 51. He is in Arlington. Walter Reed General Hospital opened in Washington on May 1, 1909, seven years after he died, and the name has carried forward since, through the Army Medical Center that closed in 2011 and into the National Military Medical Center at Bethesda. There is a medal, a tropical medicine course, a 1940 stamp. Reed himself kept pointing at Carlos Finlay, the Cuban physician who had proposed the mosquito in 1881, named the genus in 1882, and been dismissed for two decades. Finlay's name is on far less. The ethics of using soldiers and medical staff as subjects have since been reopened.

Walter Reed's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Potomac yellow fever investigation discovery
  Showed the disease followed night walks through swampy woods, not river water 1896
• Typhoid Board report discovery
  Traced the camp epidemic to fecal contact and to flies on food and drink 1898
• U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission company
  With James Carroll, Jesse Lazear and Aristides Agramonte, under George Miller Sternberg 1900
• Camp Lazear experiments discovery
  Confirmed mosquito transmission and disproved transmission by soiled clothing and bedding 1900
• Yellow fever consent documents other
  Among the oldest surviving informed-consent forms in medical research 1900
• Army Medical School professorship other
  Bacteriology and clinical microscopy, held with the curatorship of the Army Medical Museum 1893

• 1869 aged ~18 Takes an M.D. from the University of Virginia two months before turning 18 Still the youngest medical degree the university has awarded.
• 1875 aged ~24 Passes a 30-hour examination and enters the Army Medical Corps He had spent five years in New York hospitals and at the Board of Health.
• April 26, 1876 aged 24 Marries Emily Lawrence and takes her to the western posts Sixteen years of frontier assignments followed.
• 1893 aged ~42 Joins the new Army Medical School and takes charge of the Army Medical Museum
• May 1900 aged 48 Appointed head of the Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba Sternberg gave him Carroll, Lazear and Agramonte.
• September 25, 1900 aged 49 Jesse Lazear dies of yellow fever at 34 He had let an infected mosquito bite him. The deliberate act was hidden until 1947.
• November 1900 aged 49 Camp Lazear is named for the dead assistant and the experiments begin Volunteers signed consent documents drawn up in Spanish and English.
• 1901 aged ~50 Returns from Cuba and takes honorary degrees from Harvard and Michigan
• November 23, 1902 aged 51 Dies of peritonitis at 51 His appendix had ruptured. The Washington hospital named for him opened in 1909.

• William Osler 1849–1919
  Built bedside clinical teaching into American medical education as a founding Johns Hopkins professor. trained alongside at Johns Hopkins
• Geronimo 1829–1909
  Apache leader whose prolonged resistance became a powerful symbol of Indigenous opposition to U.S. expansion. commanded the Apache prisoners of
• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. later vaccine self-experimenter
• Anthony Fauci b. 1940
  Physician-scientist who shaped federal responses to HIV/AIDS, emerging infections, and the COVID-19 pandemic. inherited the consent argument
• Clara Barton 1821–1912
  Civil War nurse who founded the American Red Cross and pioneered disaster relief in America. earlier army nursing reformer
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. his findings cleared the canal for