Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/220

NAME CARROLL 198 CARROLL He moved to Burlington in 1858 and there- after was a familiar figure in the medical profession in northwestern Vermont. It was mainly through Dr. Carpenter's in- strumentaUty that the magnificent foundation of a hospital was made by Mary Fletcher. Dr. Carpenter secured the charter and as- sisted in the preparation of the plans and was long the president and consulting physician of the institution. Dr. Carpenter was a mem- ber of the Vermont State Medical Society, and at one time its president. He died in Burlington, November 9, 1892. He married three times. In 1832 he married Olivia Chase Blodgett, and had a daughter and a son. His wife died in 1840; and in 1844 he married Mrs. Anne Brown Troop, who died in April, 1869. In February, 1872, Dr. Car- penter again married, this time Adeline Brown. His only son, Dr. Benjamin W. Carpenter, was surgeon of the ninth Vermont Volunteers during the Civil War. Charles S. Caverly. Trans. Vermont Med. Soc, Burlington, 1893, H. D. Helton, Carroll, James (1854-1907) James Carroll of the United States Army, yellow-fever commissioner, was born at Wool- wich, England, June 5, 1854. He was edu- cated 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 1874 he enlisted as a private in the United States Army and served in the campaign against the Ute Indians during the winter of 1879-1880. 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 per- mission to attend medical lectures at St. Paul, Minnesota. On returning to the east he con- tinued his medical education, first at the Uni- versity of the City of New York and then at the University of Marjdand, receiving his M. D. from the latter in 1891. In 1892 and 1893 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 1898 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 med- ical commission was appointed to investigate the cause and mode of transmission of yellow fever among the American troops stationed at Havana, Carroll was appointed second m command. The work begun, the question of experiment upon human beings arose, and Carroll at once volunteered to be the subject of it. He was accordingly bitten by several mosquitos in- fected 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 transmission 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 re- covery 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, "stegomyia fasciata," and on its conclusion, in February, 1901, when Dr. Reed returned home, he re- mained for' several weeks in Cuba for the purpose of determining several doubtful points connected with the work. Moreover, in August 1901, he returned to Cuba in order to carry on a final investigation necessary to the full completion of the work of the commission and it is owing to his perseverance and firm- ness in the face of obstacles that it was finally carried to perfection. The points established by Carroll's special labors are : 1. The specific agent of yellow fever is pres- ent in the blood during at least the first, sec- ond and third days of the disease. 2. The specific agent is destroyed, or at least attenuated by heating it up to 55° C. for ten minutes. 3. Yellow fever can be produced by the in- jection of a small quantity of the diluted serum taken directly from a patient and passed through a Berkefeld filter. 4. The specific agent being capable of passing through a Berkefeld filter must belong to that class of organisms known as ultra-microscopic. On Carroll's return to the United States