Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/987

NAME REED 965 REED busy and teeming with new and original con- ceptions of liuman and divine things." He died in Philadelphia, March 19, 1808. An Account of the Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, 1762. Philadelphia. 1793. Phvsiology. Alex. Monro. Notes of His Lectures. 1746. Philadelphia Med. Museum, 1808, vol. v. Univ. and Their Sons. Philadelphia, 1898-1902. An Inquiry into the Origin of Yellow Fever, Rush, Philadelphia. 1793. Trans. Coll. Phys. Phila. Centenn., vol. 1887. Reed, Walter (1851-1902). Walter Reid, chairman of the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission, and discov- erer of the mode of propagation of the disease, was born in Gloucester County, Virginia, on September 13, 1851. His father, Lemuel Sut- ton Reed, and his mother, Pharaba White, were both of English descent and both North Carolinians by birth, though the greater part of Lemuel Reed's life was spent in Virginia as a Methodist minister. Walter, the youngest of six children, was educated at different private schools until, at tlie age of sixteen, he entered the University of Virginia. He did so with the intention of pursuing the usual undergraduate course of study, but at the end of the first year he de- termined to study medicine and graduated from the medical department of the university in 1869, being the youngest student who had ever done so. On leaving Charlottesville, he went to New York and matriculated at Bellevue Medical College, receiving his M. D. there at the end of the year. He was then associated with several hospitals in New York and Brooklyn, among which was the Kings County Hospital, where he was interne. In 1874 he made up his mind to enter the medical corps of the United States Army and, after passing the required examinations, re- ceived his commission as assistant surgeon with the rank of first lieutenant, in June, 1875. His first station was at Willet's Point, near New York Harbor, but in May, 1876, he was ordered to Arizona where he began a garrison life of thirteen years on the frontier. These years of^life in the far west were tedious and uninteresting in the extreme but they con- stituted the soil best suited to the development of Reed's talents, and the foundations of his career as a scientist were then laid. In 1889 he began to feel the necessity for time and opportunity to keep abreast of the time in medical research, and obtained an ap- pointment as examiner of recruits in Baltimore with permission to attend the course just opened to physicians at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The science of pathology and bacte- riology was then a new field of investigation and it was to these subjects in particular that he devoted himself. His first scientific paper on "The Contagiousness of Er3'sipelas'' was published in 1892, and from that time forward he was a constant contributor to medical pe- riodicals. The papers written during this pe- riod witness the indomitable perseverance and industry of the man as well as his unusual in- tellectual endowments, for not only were they all written within a single decade but the sci- entific researches they record were all executed within the same space of time. In 1898, when the Spanish-American war broke out. Reed was appointed chairman of a committee to investigate the causation and mode of propagation of the epidemic of typhoid fever among the United States volunteers, the other members being Dr. V. C. Vaughan of Ann Arbor and Dr. E. O. Shakespeare of Philadelphia. The report of this committee is a most interesting and important work, re- vealing some points concerning the disease which were not before appreciated, or even known. Reed's first association with yellow fever was in 1897, when he and Dr. James Carroll (q. V.) were appointed by Surg. -Gen. Stern- berg (q. V.) to investigate the bacillus icteroides which Sanarelli claimed to be the specific cause of yellow fever. The investi- gations carried on by them proved beyond a doubt that the bacillus icteroides is a variety of the common hog-cholera bacillus and if present in yellow fever at all it must be as a secondary invader. In 1899, when the disease appeared among the American troops stationed at Havana, a commission of medical officers from the United States Army was ap- pointed to investigate its cause and manner of transmission. Reed being chairman. The other members were Dr. Carroll, Dr. J. W. Lazear, (q. V.) and Dr. Aristides Agramonte, a Cuban immune. Shortly after Reed's arrival in Havana, in June, 1900, he had the opportunity to observe an epidemic of yellow fever at the little town of Pinar del Rio, and what he then saw con- vinced him that the prevailing belief in the transmission of the disease by means of fomites conveyed in clothing, bedding, etc., was er- roneous. He determined, therefore, that the search for the specific cause of the disease, upon which up to that time all effort had been concentrated, had better be abandoned, and every energy bent upon discovering the means by which it was transmitted. The line of in- vestigation which, in his opinion, offered most prospect of success was the theory suggested