Walter Reed

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Walter Reed (credit: Bettmann Archive)

(born Sept. 13, 1851, Belroi, Va., U.S. — died Nov. 22, 1902, Washington, D.C.) U.S. pathologist and bacteriologist. He received a medical degree at age 18 from the University of Virginia and entered the Army Medical Corps in 1875. He investigated the spread of typhoid fever in military camps during the Spanish-American War and was later curator of the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C. Yellow fever was believed to be spread by bedding and other articles, but Carlos Finlay had theorized in 1886 that it was carried by insects, and Reed's team ruled out a bacterium suspected as the cause and found patterns of spread that supported the insect theory. Controlled experiments proved transmission by mosquito bite, and in 1901 efforts to combat an outbreak in Havana succeeded within 90 days.

For more information on Walter Reed, visit Britannica.com.

A native of Virginia, Walter Reed (1851–1902) received his medical education at Bellevue Medical School in New York, worked as a district physician in Brooklyn, and then joined the U.S. Army, providing basic medical services in many parts of the frontier West. Attracted by the new science of bacteriology, he was sent by the army to study with William Henry Welch at Johns Hopkins University, and was later appointed professor of bacteriology in the Army Medical School in Washington, DC in 1893. He chaired the U.S. Army typhoid fever commission of 1899, in which he, Victor C. Vaughan, and Edward O. Shakespeare established the importance of the asymptomatic typhoid carrier.

While working on this commission, he was assigned to investigate the high mortality from yellow fever in the U.S. military forces then occupying Havana in the wake of the Spanish-American War. His research there first established that, contrary to the then official position of the Surgeon General's Office, yellow fever was not caused by a gram-negative rod, the Sanarelli bacillus. Following this research, he and his three colleagues on the Yellow Fever Commission, Aristides Agramonte, James Carroll, and Jesse Lazear, undertook to test, in experiments with human volunteers, Carlos Finlay's hypothesis that yellow fever could be transmitted by the bite of the Aedes Aegypti (then known as Stegomyia fasciata or Culex fasciatus) mosquito. A key feature of Reed's experiments was the long interval—about twelve to eighteen days—between the infecting of mosquitoes via their feeding on yellow fever patients and the exposure of human volunteers to the bites of the infected mosquitoes. Reed had been impressed by the observation of U.S. Army surgeon Henry Rose Carter that yellow fever epidemics were characterized by a two-to three-week interval between the first case and the next set of cases. Reed correctly surmised that this represented the period of incubation of the infective agent in the mosquito.

Reed's procedure successfully transmitted yellow fever to several volunteers, confirmed that Aedes Aegypti was the essential vector of the disease, and was followed immediately by a mosquito eradication program led by Major William Gorgas (1854–1920) that virtually eradicated yellow fever in Havana for the first time in recorded history. Gorgas (who attained the rank of Major General during World War I), also led the mosquito eradication program that permitted construction of the Panama Canal. Happily, all of Reed's volunteers recovered from their experimental yellow fever infections, but Jesse Lazear died after being bitten by an infected mosquito that he allowed to feed on his arm.

(SEE ALSO: Communicable Disease Control; Finlay, Carlos; Vector-Borne Diseases; Yellow Fever)

Bibliography

Kelly, H. A. (1907). Walter Reed and Yellow Fever. New York: McLure, Phillips.

— NIGEL PANETH

After receiving his M.D. degree in 1869 from the University of Virginia and spending several years working in the field of public health in New York City, Reed joined the Army Medical Department (1875). In 1898, he headed a board that identified typhoid fever as the cause of much sickness and death at the camps where troops gathered to train for the Spanish‐American War. By establishing human waste as the source of contamination, the board made possible effective public health measures to prevent future epidemics. When, in 1900, another board headed by Reed proved that yellow fever, much dreaded by soldiers sent to Cuba, was carried by a mosquito and identified the specific mosquito, successful efforts to reduce this threat to public health also became possible.

Reed's accomplishments resulted not only from his personal skills as a research scientist but from the disciplined world in which he worked: medical officers were often better able than their civilian counterparts to conduct the studies necessary to identify both major diseases that threatened public health and the means by which they spread in civilian and military communities alike. The Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., is named for him.

[See also Cuba, U.S. Military Involvement in; Disease, Tropical.]

Bibliography

• William B. Bean, Walter Reed, 1982.
• Albert E. Truby, Memoir of Walter Reed, 1943

Reed, Walter (1851-1902) U.S. army medical officer, born in Virginia. Reed was, at seventeen, the youngest person to receive a medical degree from the University of Virginia medical school. In 1875 he joined the U.S. Army Medical Department; in 1890 he was assigned to Fort Henry, in Baltimore, in order to study bacteriology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1898 he was named to head the Typhoid Board to study that disease among troops preparing for the Spanish-American War (1898). In 1900 he moved to the study of yellow fever; although he and his colleagues failed to identify the specific virus that causes the disease, they did establish its transmission by mosquito. This discovery enabled the army to virtually eliminate yellow fever as a threat to Americans in the Caribbean and tropical regions.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Walter Reed (1851-1902), American military surgeon and head of the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission, is widely known as the man who conquered yellow fever by tracing its origin to a particular mosquito species.

Walter Reed was born on Sept. 13, 1851, at Belroi, Va., the son of a Methodist minister. After attending private schools, Reed entered the University of Virginia, where he received his medical degree in 1869, after completing only 2 years. He then went to New York, where he received a second medical degree from the Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1870. After working for the Board of Health of New York and of Brooklyn, Reed was commissioned an assistant surgeon in the U.S. Army with the rank of first lieutenant in June 1875. Then followed 11 years of frontier garrison duty, further study at Johns Hopkins Hospital while on duty in Baltimore, and an assignment as professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy at the newly organized Army Medical School in Washington in 1893.

When yellow fever made its appearance among American troops in Havana, Cuba, in 1900, Reed was appointed head of the commission of U.S. Army medical officers to investigate the cause and mode of transmission. After some months of fruitless work in searching for the cause of the disease, Reed and his associates decided to concentrate upon determining the mode of transmission. Carlos Juan Finlay first advanced the theory that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes (he blamed it on the Stegomyia fasciata, later known as the Aedes aegypti) and proved it by experiments, but physicians generally did not credit the possibility. Walter Reed confirmed Finlay's findings by using human subjects. In fact, there was no alternative to experimentation with humans; Reed and his associates argued persuasively that the results would justify the procedure. Mosquitoes that had been fed on yellow fever-infected blood were applied to several of Reed's associates, including Dr. James Carroll, who developed the first experimental case of the disease.

Then followed a series of controlled experiments with soldier volunteers. In all, 22 cases of experimental yellow fever were produced: 14 by mosquito bites, 6 by injections of blood, and 2 by injections of filtered blood serum. At the same time, in order to eliminate the possibility of transmission by contact, Dr. Robert P. Cook and a group of soldiers slept in a detached building in close contact with the clothing and bedding of yellow fever patients from the camp hospital. Since no case of illness resulted from any of these contacts, the theory was conclusively proved.

The value of the commission's work quickly became evident. In 1900 there had been 1,400 cases of yellow fever in Havana; by 1902, after the attack, mounted because of the commission's report, on the mosquito had been under way for over a year in Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone, there was not a single case. Now that its mode of transmission is known, there is no danger of yellow fever in any country with adequate control facilities.

Reed returned to Washington, D.C., in February 1901 and resumed his teaching duties at the Army Medical School. In 1902 Harvard University and the University of Michigan gave him honorary degrees. Only a few days before his death in Washington on Nov. 22, 1902, he was appointed librarian of the Army Medical Library. The Walter Reed Hospital in Washington was named in his honor.

Further Reading

Howard A. Kelly, Walter Reed and Yellow Fever (1906; 3d ed. rev. 1923), includes a bibliography of Reed's writings. See also Albert E. Truby, Memoir of Walter Reed: The Yellow Fever Episode (1943).

Additional Sources

Bean, William Bennett, Walter Reed: a biography, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982.

This article is about the U.S. army surgeon. For other people and things with the name Walter Reed, see Walter Reed (disambiguation).

Walter Reed
Walter Reed
Born	September 13, 1851(1851-09-13) Belroi, Virginia, U.S.
Died	November 23, 1902 (aged 51) Washington, DC
Alma mater	University of Virginia New York University Johns Hopkins University
Occupation	Military physician
Spouse(s)	Emilie Lawrence (m. 1876) «start: (1876-04-26)»"Marriage: Emilie Lawrence to Walter Reed" Location: (linkback:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reed)
Children	one son and daughter, one adopted Indian daughter
Parents	Lemuel Sutton Reed and Pharaba White

Major Walter Reed, M.D., (September 13, 1851 – November 23, 1902) was a U.S. Army physician who in 1900 led the team which postulated and confirmed the theory that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes, rather than by direct contact. This insight gave impetus to the new fields of epidemiology and biomedicine and most immediately allowed the resumption and completion of work on the Panama Canal (1904–14) by the United States.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Legacy 3 References 3.1 Citations 3.2 Other sources 4 External links

Biography

Walter Reed was born in Belroi, Virginia and moved to Lebanon, Missouri, an unincorporated community in Laclede County, to Lemuel Sutton Reed (a Methodist minister) and Pharaba White.

Walter Reed Birthplace

After two year-long classes at the University of Virginia, Reed completed the M.D. degree in 1869, at the age of 18. He then enrolled at the New York University's Bellevue Hospital Medical College in Manhattan, New York, where he obtained a second M.D. in 1870. After interning at several New York City hospitals, he worked for the New York Board of Health until 1875. He married Emilie (born Emily) Lawrence on April 26, 1876 and took her west with him. Later, Emilie would give birth to a son and a daughter and the couple would adopt an Indian girl while posted in frontier camps.^[1]

With his youth apparently limiting his influence, Reed joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps, both for its professional opportunities and the modest financial security it could provide. He spent much of his Army career until 1893 at difficult postings in the American West, at one point, looking after several hundred Apache Indians, including Geronimo. During one of his last tours, he completed advanced coursework in pathology and bacteriology in the Johns Hopkins University Hospital Pathology Laboratory.

Reed joined the faculty of the newly-opened Army Medical School in Washington, D.C. in 1893, where he held the professorship of Bacteriology and Clinical Microscopy. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, he actively pursued medical research projects and served as the curator of the Army Medical Museum, which later became the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM).

Reed first traveled to Cuba in 1899 to study disease in U.S. Army encampments there. Yellow fever became a problem for the Army during the Spanish-American War, felling thousands of soldiers in Cuba.

In May 1900, Reed, a major, returned to Cuba when he was appointed head of the Army board charged by Surgeon General George Miller Sternberg to examine tropical diseases including yellow fever. Sternberg was one of the founders of bacteriology during this time of great advances in medicine due to widespread acceptance of Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease as well as the methods of studying bacteria developed by Robert Koch.

During Reed's tenure with the US Army Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba, the board confirmed both the transmission by mosquitoes and disproved the common belief that yellow fever could be transmitted by clothing and bedding soiled by the body fluids and excrement of yellow fever sufferers – articles known as fomites.

The board conducted many of its dramatic series of experiments at Camp Lazear, named in November 1900 for Reed's assistant and friend Jesse William Lazear who had died two months earlier of yellow fever while a member of the Commission.

The risky but fruitful research work was done with human volunteers, including some of the medical personnel such as Lazear and Clara Maass who allowed themselves to be deliberately infected. The research work with the disease under Reed's leadership was largely responsible for stemming the mortality rates from yellow fever during the building of the Panama Canal, something that had confounded the French attempts to build in that region only 30 years earlier.

Although Dr. Reed received much of the credit in history books for "beating" yellow fever, Reed himself credited Dr. Carlos Finlay with the discovery of the yellow fever vector, and thus how it might be controlled. Dr. Reed often cited Finlay's papers in his own articles and gave him credit for the discovery, even in his personal correspondence ^[2]

Following Reed's return from Cuba in 1901, he continued to speak and publish on yellow fever. He received honorary degrees from Harvard and the University of Michigan in recognition of his seminal work.

In November 1902, Reed's appendix ruptured; he died on November 23, 1902, of the resulting peritonitis, at age 51. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Legacy

Reed's breakthrough in yellow fever research is widely considered a milestone in biomedicine, opening new vistas of research and humanitarianism.

• Walter Reed General Hospital (WRGH), Washington, D.C. was opened on May 1, 1909, seven years after his death.
• Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) opened in 1977 as the successor to WRGH; it is the world-wide tertiary care medical center for the U.S. Army and is utilized by congressmen and presidents.
• Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), near Washington, DC, is the largest biomedical research facility administered by the DoD.
• Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a new hospital complex to be constructed on the grounds of the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland by 2011.
• Riverside Walter Reed Hospital in Gloucester, Virginia (near Reed's birthplace) opened on September 13, 1977.

• Walter Reed Medal (1912 to present) was awarded posthumously to Reed for his yellow fever work.
• Walter Reed Middle School, North Hollywood, California is named in Reed's honor.

• Reed was portrayed dramatically by actor Lewis Stone in a 1938 Hollywood movie, Yellow Jack (from a 1934 play). The same storyline was again presented in television episodes (both titled “Yellow Jack”) of Celanese Theatre (1952) and of Producers' Showcase (1955), in the latter of which Reed was portrayed by actor Broderick Crawford.
• A song, "Walter Reed", was released by Michael Penn and tells of a soldier's desire to be taken to Walter Reed Medical Center.
• PBS's American Experience series broadcast a 2006 episode, The Great Fever, on the Reed yellow fever campaign.
• Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Library
• Walter Reed Army Medical Center Firefighters Washington D.C. IAFF F151

References

Citations

1. ^ Crosby, Molly Caldwell (2006). The American Plague:The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History, p. 134. New York: Berkley Books. ISBN 0-425-21202-5
2. ^ Pierce J.R., J, Writer. 2005. Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered its Deadly Secrets. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 0-471-47261-1

Other sources

• Bean, William B., Walter Reed: A Biography, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1982.
• Bean, William B., “Walter Reed and Yellow Fever,” JAMA 250.5 (August 5, 1983): 659–62.
• Pierce J.R., J, Writer. 2005. Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered its Deadly Secrets. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 0-471-47261-1

External links

• Video: Reed Medical Pioneers Biography on Health.mil – The Military Health System provides a look at the life and work of Walter Reed.
• WRAMC Website Reed History
• WRAIR Website Reed History
• University of Virginia, Philip S. Hench – Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection: Walter Reed Biography

• Walter Reed at Find a Grave

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