Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/274

 CARROLL

CARROLL

illustrations in the form of stories, made a deep impression on all the classes. He moved to Burlington in 1858 and thence forwards was a familiar figure in the medical profession in northwestern Vermont.

It was mainly through Dr. Carpenter's instrumentality that the magnificent foundation of a hospital was made by Mary Fletcher. Dr. Carpenter secured the charter and assisted in the preparation of the plans and was long the president and consulting physician of the institu- tion. Dr. Carpenter was a member of the Vermont State Medical Society, and at one time its president. He died in Burlington, November 9, 1S92.

He married three times. In 1832 to Olivia Chase Blodgett, and had a daughter and a son. His wife died in 1S40; and in 1S44 he married Mrs. Anne (Brown) Troop, but she died in April, 1S69. In February, 1872, Dr. Carpenter again married, this time Adeline Brown. His only son, Dr. Benjamin W. Carpenter was surgeon of the ninth Vermont Volunteers during the Civil War.

C. S. C.

Tr. Vermont Med. Soc. (H. D. Holton).

Burlington, 1S93

Carroll, James (1854-1907).

James Carroll of the United States Army, yellow-fever commissioner, was born at Woolwich, England, June 5, 1854. He was educated at a private school, Albion House, and it was intended that he should enter the British Navy as an engineer student. When he was fifteen, however, he emigrated to Canada and there for several years lived what he described as the life of a backwoodsman.

In 1S74 he enlisted as a private in the United States Army and served in the campaign against the Ute Indians during the winter of 1S79-1SS0. While acting as hospital steward at Fort Custer, Montana, he became much interested in the subject of medicine and after some difficulty he succeeded in obtaining permission to attend medical lectures at St. Paul, Minnesota. On returning to the east

he continued his medical education first at the University of the City of New York and then at the University of Maryland, receiving his M. D. from the latter in 1891. In 1892 and 1S93 he attended courses in bacteriology and pathology then opened to physicians at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and became intensely interested in these subjects.

In 1897 he was assigned, together with Dr. Walter Reed, to the work of investigating the bacillus icteroides, erroneously claimed to be the specific cause of yellow fever, and in 1S98 was sent to Fort Alger to study the blood of fever patients there, and it was he who demonstrated the illness then prevailing among the troops to be typhoid and not malarial fever. In 1900, when an army medical commission was appointed to investigate the cause and mode of transmission of yellow fever among the American troops stationed at Havana, Carroll wasappointed second in command.

The work begun, the question of ex- periment upon human beings arose, and Carroll at once volunteered to be the subject of it. He was accordingly bitten by several mosquitos infected by yellow- fever patients and three days later developed the disease in a most severe form, from which he barely escaped with his life. The theory of mosquito trans- mission was then understood by only a few experts and when Carroll, in the early stage of his illness, told the nurse that he had acquired the disease through the bite of a mosquito, she disbelieved him so entirely that upon recovery he found the following note among the records of his case: "Says he got his illness from the bite of a mosquito — delirious!"

When sufficiently recovered, Carroll took up the preliminary experiments, Dr. Reed, the chairman, being then in the United States, and carried them out to a satisfactory conclusion by the time Reed returned. He assisted most efficiently in the further investigation by which it was proved conclusively that yellow fever is transmitted by the mosquito, "stego-