Page:The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology-ItsFirstCentury.djvu/138

THE WALTER REED CHAPTER breeding, rearing, and caring for Dr. Finlay's mosquitoes and those obtained from other sources. Hospital Steward John S. Neate, of the staff of the Medical Museum, who was sent to Cuba in June for service with the Reed Board, had the hazardous and exacting task of the daily care and feeding of Dr. Lazear's "birds." 20

To carry out the contemplated experiments, however, there had to be more than a theory and a breeding stock of mosquitoes. There had to be money, for one thing — precious little money by comparison with modern expenditures or in relation to the results accomplished, but money just the same. And there had to be experimental "animals" — and so far as anyone then knew, the only animal subject to yellow fever was the genus Man, himself. This disturbing fact led to another problem — not where to get the men necessary for the experiments, for that problem was to be solved by ready volunteers, but whether to authorize experiments on human subjects. In the light of the results accomplished, that question does not seem as thorny now as it must have seemed to Dr. Reed, who had the responsibility for proposing such a course to Surgeon General Sternberg, and to Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, Governor General of Cuba, who had the final responsibility for authorizing human experimentation. It happens that the experiment was brilliantly successful, and that the only life lost was that of one of the experimenters, but it is easy to imagine, if things had turned out differently, the outcry that would have assailed those responsible. Fortunately, the United States was represented in Cuba in 1900 by a governor general who, being a medical officer himself, had the understanding of the problem and the courage to face it in his own responsibility — and Walter Reed got the necessary authority and backing. Before all arrangements for the mosquito tests could be set up, Reed was compelled, on account of the death of Dr. Edward O. Shakespeare of the Typhoid Board, to hasten back to the United States to work on the preparation of the report of that board for publication.21 He left Cuba on 2 August, and did not get back to Quemados until 4 October. In his absence, there had been developments both tragic and triumphant in the work on yellow fever.

One of the conditions upon which the Yellow Fever Board had recommended the use of human "guinea pigs" in its work was that the members of