WEBVTT - Walter Reed 0:00:01.080 --> 0:00:04.600 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from works 0:00:04.640 --> 0:00:13.319 dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm turning 0:00:13.360 --> 0:00:16.760 tem Wilson and I'm Holly Fryed. So most people, at 0:00:16.800 --> 0:00:19.720 least in the United States have probably at least heard 0:00:19.920 --> 0:00:23.439 of Walter Reid, if only for the name of the 0:00:23.560 --> 0:00:28.000 Army Medical Center before it became kind of notorious due 0:00:28.040 --> 0:00:31.560 to a really huge neglect scandal in the late two thousands. 0:00:32.040 --> 0:00:34.599 It had previously made a name for itself as the 0:00:34.640 --> 0:00:38.000 heart of military medicine in the United States. UM. The 0:00:38.080 --> 0:00:42.080 Army Medical Center actually closed in eleven and was replaced 0:00:42.080 --> 0:00:46.959 by Walter read National Military Medical Center. So it's probably 0:00:47.000 --> 0:00:50.600 a surprise to no one that you know, the major 0:00:50.720 --> 0:00:53.840 military medical center in the United States was named for 0:00:53.880 --> 0:00:57.960 an Army doctor, and that was Walter Reid. Walter Reid 0:00:58.040 --> 0:01:01.960 did truly ground breaking work into the causes and prevention 0:01:02.080 --> 0:01:05.920 of yellow fever, which was a hugely destructive disease to 0:01:05.959 --> 0:01:10.440 the American military and to other militaries and to civilians 0:01:10.560 --> 0:01:14.800 outside of the military world, UM, both within and outside 0:01:14.800 --> 0:01:17.400 of the United States. But he really didn't do this 0:01:17.480 --> 0:01:20.399 all on his own. His accomplishments really built on a 0:01:20.440 --> 0:01:25.080 foundation of other doctors and other researchers. But even so, 0:01:26.000 --> 0:01:29.320 it had a huge and drastic impact on public health 0:01:29.959 --> 0:01:33.000 UH and on the American military's ability to work in 0:01:33.160 --> 0:01:37.240 tropical locations, which had previously been fraught with all kinds 0:01:37.280 --> 0:01:41.840 of health problems. So Walter Reed was born on September 0:01:41.920 --> 0:01:45.759 thirteenth of eighteen fifty one to Lemuel Sutton and Faraba 0:01:45.800 --> 0:01:49.480 White Red. Lemuel was a Methodist minister, and Walter had 0:01:49.520 --> 0:01:53.240 four older siblings, three brothers and one sister named Laura, 0:01:53.280 --> 0:01:56.680 who was the oldest. Because the elder Read was a minister, 0:01:56.880 --> 0:01:59.920 the family spent most of Walter's childhood moving from place 0:02:00.040 --> 0:02:03.800 to place as the Methodist Church assigned him to different congregations. 0:02:04.640 --> 0:02:08.560 Walter's older brothers, two of them Tom and James, fought 0:02:08.560 --> 0:02:11.079 for the South during the Civil War, which ran through 0:02:11.080 --> 0:02:15.880 Walter's early teenage years. After the war was over, Lemuel 0:02:15.919 --> 0:02:19.520 requested that he moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. He wanted his 0:02:19.560 --> 0:02:22.200 sons to be educated, and living in Charlottesville meant that 0:02:22.240 --> 0:02:24.600 they could go to the University of Virginia, and his 0:02:24.680 --> 0:02:30.200 request was indeed granted. Unfortunately, though Walter's mother died not 0:02:30.360 --> 0:02:33.440 long after they arrived in Charlottesville, and she was only 0:02:33.480 --> 0:02:37.480 forty one at that point. Walter was only fourteen, and 0:02:37.560 --> 0:02:39.960 it might have been her death that prompted him to 0:02:40.120 --> 0:02:43.720 really throw himself into his studies. He was just an 0:02:43.720 --> 0:02:47.880 exceptional student even before he started college. A sort of 0:02:47.880 --> 0:02:50.720 a side note, his father also remarried pretty quickly, and 0:02:50.800 --> 0:02:53.200 the rest of the family quickly became very fond of 0:02:53.240 --> 0:02:57.359 his new wife. Not long after his mother's death, Walter, 0:02:57.720 --> 0:03:00.400 now fifteen at this point, started school well. At the 0:03:00.480 --> 0:03:04.120 University of Virginia. Students normally could not enroll until they 0:03:04.160 --> 0:03:07.120 were sixteen, but exceptions were made if they had older 0:03:07.120 --> 0:03:10.359 brothers attending, and two of Walter's three older brothers were 0:03:10.400 --> 0:03:13.440 already in school there, although it turned out that Walter 0:03:13.639 --> 0:03:17.679 was the only one of them to graduate. He originally 0:03:17.880 --> 0:03:21.400 intended to study classics that he soon made the move 0:03:21.440 --> 0:03:25.960 to the medical program instead. This actually was largely due 0:03:26.040 --> 0:03:29.680 to financial and time reasons. It was faster and thus 0:03:29.800 --> 0:03:31.959 cheaper to get an m d than an m A, 0:03:32.400 --> 0:03:36.080 which probably seems extremely strange to people who are familiar 0:03:36.120 --> 0:03:39.000 with how much it takes to get a medical degree today, 0:03:39.520 --> 0:03:42.760 and Walter's medical training touches on a number of previous 0:03:42.800 --> 0:03:46.560 podcast subjects. So cadavers used for study were provided to 0:03:46.600 --> 0:03:50.160 the school by resurrectionists who stole them from local graveyards, 0:03:50.240 --> 0:03:53.080 which we talked about in our episode on the Doctor's Riot. 0:03:54.720 --> 0:03:58.360 And like many of the other historical doctors we've talked about, 0:03:58.760 --> 0:04:02.200 Walter's first round of medical study included almost no practical 0:04:02.360 --> 0:04:06.040 or clinical work. So when he graduated on July one, 0:04:06.200 --> 0:04:10.400 eighteen sixty nine, after just two years, and also as 0:04:10.440 --> 0:04:13.040 one of the youngest people to do it, he had 0:04:13.080 --> 0:04:16.120 to pursue another degree so that he could get more 0:04:16.279 --> 0:04:20.440 actual hands on experience being a doctor. And first the 0:04:20.480 --> 0:04:22.880 young doctor Reid went to New York, where he enrolled 0:04:23.000 --> 0:04:26.520 in Bellevue Hospital Medical College. He got another m d 0:04:26.720 --> 0:04:30.120 there in eighteen seventy, and since he'd taken care of 0:04:30.160 --> 0:04:33.120 most of his science and medical classes in Virginia, this 0:04:33.320 --> 0:04:35.680 was mostly hands on study, and then he went on 0:04:35.760 --> 0:04:39.200 to do internships at hospitals around New York. A lot 0:04:39.240 --> 0:04:41.960 of reads work during this time was with poor people 0:04:42.040 --> 0:04:45.360 in communities that didn't have a lot of medical resources, 0:04:45.360 --> 0:04:49.320 so he became increasingly aware of the kinds of diseases 0:04:49.400 --> 0:04:54.680 that really caused crises in the world of public health. Typhus, typhoid, 0:04:54.839 --> 0:04:57.760 and yellow fever, for example, were all diseases that could 0:04:57.760 --> 0:05:01.960 just ravage poor communities, and he started working to understand 0:05:01.960 --> 0:05:05.120 all of them. This is particularly true during the four 0:05:05.160 --> 0:05:08.400 months he spent working at King's County Hospital in Brooklyn, 0:05:08.400 --> 0:05:11.120 New York in eighteen seventy one, because that was a 0:05:11.160 --> 0:05:15.680 facility specifically for the poor. By eighteen seventy three, and 0:05:15.720 --> 0:05:18.480 at this point he was only twenty two, Read joined 0:05:18.520 --> 0:05:21.679 the Brooklyn Board of Health as an assistant sanitary officer, 0:05:22.200 --> 0:05:24.039 and this meant that he was too busy to start 0:05:24.040 --> 0:05:27.200 a private practice, and he was still so young that 0:05:27.240 --> 0:05:30.919 people didn't really seem to take him seriously. Reid started 0:05:30.920 --> 0:05:32.560 a doubt that he would ever be able to make 0:05:32.560 --> 0:05:34.600 the kind of change he wanted since he could not 0:05:34.640 --> 0:05:36.800 seem to get people to respect his knowledge in the 0:05:36.839 --> 0:05:40.279 medical field. So, seeing that he wasn't going to be 0:05:40.320 --> 0:05:42.320 able to make the kinds of strides that he really 0:05:42.320 --> 0:05:46.040 wanted to, he eventually decided to join the Army Medical Corps, 0:05:46.279 --> 0:05:51.120 which were a multi day multidisciplinary affair, in January of 0:05:51.160 --> 0:05:55.080 eighteen seventy five. Afterward, he was commissioned as a first 0:05:55.120 --> 0:05:58.360 lieutenant at the age of twenty four, and as all 0:05:58.400 --> 0:06:02.360 of this uh professional development was going on, Reid had 0:06:02.400 --> 0:06:06.599 been courting a woman named Emily Lawrence, primarily through letters. 0:06:07.240 --> 0:06:11.000 He had met her while visiting family in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, 0:06:11.080 --> 0:06:14.200 in eighteen seventy four, and he married her on April 0:06:14.880 --> 0:06:18.120 eighteen seventy six before he left for Arizona Territory with 0:06:18.200 --> 0:06:22.400 the Medical Corps. He actually dinnerd quite a lot about 0:06:22.400 --> 0:06:26.479 getting married. He had some worries about what life was 0:06:26.520 --> 0:06:28.880 going to be like for the wife of a frontier 0:06:29.000 --> 0:06:35.480 army doctor. Um. He just sort of seemed concerned in 0:06:35.520 --> 0:06:38.320 a lot of ways, and so she had to do 0:06:38.400 --> 0:06:42.279 some convincing, including kind of implying that perhaps someone else 0:06:42.440 --> 0:06:45.560 was interested in her, so maybe he ought to get 0:06:45.600 --> 0:06:50.520 his act together. Um. So when he did finally propose, 0:06:50.560 --> 0:06:53.000 it was pretty sudden. He basically proposed, and then they 0:06:53.040 --> 0:06:55.840 wedged the wedding into a window of time when he 0:06:55.880 --> 0:06:59.720 could actually make it to Murfreesboro to have the ceremony. 0:07:00.040 --> 0:07:02.599 The newly weds didn't actually get to live together until 0:07:02.600 --> 0:07:06.400 the following November, when Emily met him in San Francisco 0:07:06.520 --> 0:07:09.280 after taking a train which was a side note had 0:07:09.320 --> 0:07:11.920 some sort of wreck along the way across the country, 0:07:12.520 --> 0:07:14.760 and this was just the first of many separations they 0:07:14.760 --> 0:07:16.960 would endure due to his work, and they wrote each 0:07:16.960 --> 0:07:21.400 other volumes of letters during these times apart. It was 0:07:21.520 --> 0:07:25.040 also the first of many adventures in their marriage, because, 0:07:25.240 --> 0:07:27.960 as we mentioned earlier, a lot of his early career 0:07:28.040 --> 0:07:31.480 in the medical Corps involved him being a frontier doctor. 0:07:31.560 --> 0:07:35.160 He was moved from one post to another, and often 0:07:35.240 --> 0:07:38.400 their existence was really difficult and isolated, and a lot 0:07:38.440 --> 0:07:41.360 of the hospitals that he worked from were basically temporary 0:07:41.440 --> 0:07:45.480 structures meant to sort of serve a temporary need out 0:07:45.520 --> 0:07:49.119 on the frontier. They eventually had a son named Walter 0:07:49.240 --> 0:07:53.000 Lawrence and a daughter named Emily, who they called Blossom. 0:07:53.080 --> 0:07:56.440 Walter Senior most likely delivered his son himself, as at 0:07:56.480 --> 0:07:59.520 that point they were stationed at for Apache on the frontier. 0:08:00.200 --> 0:08:02.080 Also living with them for many years it was a 0:08:02.080 --> 0:08:05.640 young Native American girl named Susie, who Read had treated 0:08:05.680 --> 0:08:09.240 for serious burns after some sort of inter tribal battle. 0:08:09.760 --> 0:08:12.880 Susie wound up living with the family for about fifteen years. 0:08:12.880 --> 0:08:17.360 He was sort of a combinations surrogate daughter and help 0:08:17.400 --> 0:08:21.600 around the house. At first, Read was a frontier Army doctor, 0:08:21.640 --> 0:08:24.600 as we said, moving from garrison to garrison mostly around 0:08:24.640 --> 0:08:28.120 the American West, and these remote outposts did not have 0:08:28.280 --> 0:08:31.120 the sorts of facilities or resources that Read needed to 0:08:31.160 --> 0:08:35.600 continue his studies of bacteriology and pathology, so he requested 0:08:35.600 --> 0:08:37.680 a leave of absence. As Tracy said, a lot of 0:08:37.679 --> 0:08:40.360 these facilities were just temporary setups, so they were not 0:08:40.360 --> 0:08:41.800 going to have a lab where he could really do 0:08:41.840 --> 0:08:45.920 this work. Instead, he ended up transferred to Baltimore at 0:08:45.920 --> 0:08:47.800 a couple of points, which allowed him to work at 0:08:47.880 --> 0:08:54.520 Johns Hopkins University Hospital Pathology Laboratory. Two really monumental things 0:08:54.559 --> 0:08:57.560 happened in Read's life in eight and we're going to 0:08:57.600 --> 0:09:00.559 talk about them after a brief word from US sponsor. 0:09:01.440 --> 0:09:03.720 To get back to Walter, Read a couple of big things, 0:09:03.840 --> 0:09:06.280 as we said, before the break changed in his life. 0:09:06.360 --> 0:09:12.559 In one George Miller Sternberg became the Surgeon General and 0:09:12.800 --> 0:09:16.840 to the new Surgeon General established the Army Medical School. 0:09:17.000 --> 0:09:20.320 He did this kind of discreetly because Congress was reluctant 0:09:20.360 --> 0:09:23.440 to spend money in the wake of a financial panic. 0:09:23.520 --> 0:09:28.280 That year. Walter was named to the Army Medical schools faculty. 0:09:28.920 --> 0:09:31.360 At this point, Read had been promoted up through the 0:09:31.440 --> 0:09:34.600 ranks in the military to major. He was also appointed 0:09:34.600 --> 0:09:37.440 to be the curator of the Army Medical Museum and 0:09:37.520 --> 0:09:40.680 had become a faculty member at Columbian University, which would 0:09:40.679 --> 0:09:45.640 eventually become George Washington University. So, after years of moving 0:09:45.679 --> 0:09:48.600 from place to place, he and the family went to Washington, 0:09:48.679 --> 0:09:52.040 d c. And while he continued to travel for his work, 0:09:52.480 --> 0:09:55.760 this put an end to constantly uprooting the family to 0:09:55.840 --> 0:09:59.520 go to a new outpost. His early interest in public 0:09:59.559 --> 0:10:02.040 health played out in a study of the diseases that 0:10:02.080 --> 0:10:07.119 were most problematic to the military. So he studied typhoid, cholera, malaria, 0:10:07.240 --> 0:10:09.440 which was still pretty prevalent in the U S at 0:10:09.440 --> 0:10:14.960 the time, and yellow fever. In he studied a malaria 0:10:15.040 --> 0:10:18.120 outbreak that happened at Fort Meyer and at the Washington 0:10:18.240 --> 0:10:22.480 Army Barracks. There's actually a fair amount of medical work 0:10:22.559 --> 0:10:26.000 going on at this time that correctly identified the cause 0:10:26.040 --> 0:10:29.200 of malaria as a parasite that was spread by mosquitoes. 0:10:29.320 --> 0:10:33.040 But you know, the world of information spread being much 0:10:33.640 --> 0:10:36.880 uh more limited than it is today, this had not 0:10:37.200 --> 0:10:41.200 caught hold everywhere yet and read in particular, didn't think 0:10:41.240 --> 0:10:43.760 that the mosquito was the culprit, in part because he 0:10:43.800 --> 0:10:47.080 had spotted a number of errors in the latest paper 0:10:47.160 --> 0:10:51.200 that was promoting that connection. Instead, he thought it was 0:10:51.240 --> 0:10:53.600 bad air, which is not surprising. A lot of people 0:10:53.640 --> 0:10:56.040 thought it was bad air, and the world malaria comes 0:10:56.080 --> 0:11:00.160 from Italian terms for bad air. And while he was 0:11:00.200 --> 0:11:03.120 definitely on the wrong track, he did dispel the idea 0:11:03.160 --> 0:11:06.640 that malaria was water born. He pointed out that healthy 0:11:06.640 --> 0:11:09.439 people in Washington were using the same water source as 0:11:09.480 --> 0:11:14.439 six soldiers in Fort Meyer, and that saw the highest 0:11:14.480 --> 0:11:17.559 number of malaria cases in years, even though a water 0:11:17.640 --> 0:11:22.400 filtration program was in place. His research wound up looking 0:11:22.440 --> 0:11:26.000 at all kinds of factors and found all kinds of 0:11:26.040 --> 0:11:29.520 patterns and who got malaria and when. So even though 0:11:29.559 --> 0:11:32.960 he never arrived at the correct conclusion from all of it, 0:11:32.960 --> 0:11:37.880 it was useful data to have. The Spanish American War 0:11:38.520 --> 0:11:41.880 broke out in and it only went on for roughly 0:11:41.880 --> 0:11:43.720 three and a half months, and in the end the 0:11:43.840 --> 0:11:47.360 United States had temporary control of Cuba and had troops 0:11:47.360 --> 0:11:50.679 stationed there, but this came with a number of problems. 0:11:51.240 --> 0:11:54.439 Cuba's tropical climate was home to several diseases that US 0:11:54.480 --> 0:11:58.880 troops had little or no natural resistance to. Wilter Reid 0:11:58.960 --> 0:12:02.840 been extensive work pertaining to two of them, typhoid and 0:12:02.960 --> 0:12:07.120 yellow fever. During this period, the Secretary of War appointed 0:12:07.160 --> 0:12:10.000 a medical board that he directed to study diseases that 0:12:10.040 --> 0:12:14.319 were prevalent on Cuba. The Surgeon General also established a 0:12:14.360 --> 0:12:17.920 board specifically to study yellow fever, and for that board, 0:12:18.559 --> 0:12:21.520 Read was tapped to be head. He traveled back and 0:12:21.559 --> 0:12:24.720 forth between Washington and Cuba several times over the next 0:12:24.800 --> 0:12:29.880 several years working with these diseases. UH first typhoid fever, 0:12:30.320 --> 0:12:32.480 so not to be confused with typhus, which is spread 0:12:32.480 --> 0:12:37.640 by fleas. Typhoid fever is caused by bacteria Salmonilla typhee, 0:12:37.840 --> 0:12:41.040 which is spread through feces. Today, there is a vaccine 0:12:41.080 --> 0:12:43.760 for it and it's usually treatable with antibiotics, but that 0:12:43.840 --> 0:12:48.040 was not true in the eighteen hundreds. So typhoid is 0:12:48.120 --> 0:12:51.600 carried in the stools of infected people and it's transmitted 0:12:51.600 --> 0:12:56.000 by contact in one way or another with those infected stools. 0:12:56.000 --> 0:13:00.200 So that can mean flies crawling around on fece and 0:13:00.240 --> 0:13:04.040 then crawling around on food. It can also be transmitted 0:13:04.080 --> 0:13:08.160 when water or milk or are contaminated with infected feces, 0:13:08.280 --> 0:13:11.960 and people can continue to spread it even after they've 0:13:12.000 --> 0:13:17.760 recovered Allah the infamous typhoid Mary. At this time, the 0:13:17.840 --> 0:13:21.320 military had huge sanitation procedures in place to try to 0:13:21.360 --> 0:13:24.240 prevent the spread of typhoid, but many of them just 0:13:24.280 --> 0:13:27.959 weren't effective. They had to do with cleanliness and disposal 0:13:27.960 --> 0:13:30.600 of waste, but it's still spread from one infected person 0:13:30.679 --> 0:13:34.560 to another. Camps would be relocated entirely for fear of 0:13:34.600 --> 0:13:40.520 contaminated water sources. Although Reid was definitely involved in study 0:13:40.559 --> 0:13:43.120 and trying to come up with plans for how to 0:13:43.160 --> 0:13:47.359 prevent the spread of the disease, like new latrine designs 0:13:47.400 --> 0:13:50.520 to try to keep the waste away from other things. 0:13:51.080 --> 0:13:55.240 The primary researchers on it were Victor Vaughan and George Sternberg, 0:13:55.400 --> 0:14:00.000 and unfortunately their work didn't really get to a satisfy 0:14:00.000 --> 0:14:04.040 factory conclusion. During Reed's lifetime, they didn't manage to wipe 0:14:04.080 --> 0:14:08.439 out typhoid. It was basically endemic in the military, and 0:14:08.679 --> 0:14:11.840 efforts to clean up after it just were not enough. 0:14:12.280 --> 0:14:15.600 In the end, Vaccines, which were developed not long after 0:14:15.640 --> 0:14:17.400 the turn of the century, did a lot more to 0:14:17.400 --> 0:14:20.480 stop the disease than all of their hygiene efforts, which 0:14:20.480 --> 0:14:24.040 were just not sufficient. In the end, he took a 0:14:24.120 --> 0:14:27.640 much greater lead in the fight against yellow fever, and 0:14:27.800 --> 0:14:30.560 his work with yellow fever wound up being a lot 0:14:30.600 --> 0:14:32.720 more effective than the work of the team was doing 0:14:32.760 --> 0:14:36.760 to try to control typhoid. Yellow fever was a huge 0:14:36.880 --> 0:14:39.000 problem in Cuba as well as in parts of the 0:14:39.080 --> 0:14:42.160 United States. In less tropical parts of the world, the 0:14:42.240 --> 0:14:45.680 disease was fairly seasonal, with huge outbreaks when the weather 0:14:45.800 --> 0:14:52.160 was warm. It's a hemorrhagic disease that causes fever, joint pain, vomiting, hemorrhaging, 0:14:52.320 --> 0:14:56.720 bloodshot eyes, and jaundice. Yellow fever had two nicknames. One 0:14:56.800 --> 0:14:59.840 was yellow Jack, which obviously was because of the jaund 0:15:00.600 --> 0:15:03.120 and the other one and heads up, this is gross, 0:15:03.680 --> 0:15:06.600 was the black vomit because in the end stages of 0:15:06.640 --> 0:15:10.080 the disease, people would bleed into their digestive systems and 0:15:10.080 --> 0:15:12.440 then they would throw that up, and what they threw 0:15:12.480 --> 0:15:15.920 up was black because of the enzymes interacting with the blood. 0:15:17.200 --> 0:15:19.480 One of the worst parts of disease was that the 0:15:19.520 --> 0:15:22.400 symptoms often cleared up after a few days, which made 0:15:22.400 --> 0:15:25.720 people think they were going to survive, but then the 0:15:25.760 --> 0:15:27.920 symptoms would come back as the liver failed and the 0:15:28.000 --> 0:15:32.400 internal hemorrhaging started. It was absolutely horrifying, and the mortality 0:15:32.480 --> 0:15:38.440 rate was up to the prevailing theory before Walter Reid 0:15:38.520 --> 0:15:41.720 really got involved was that yellow fever was spread by fomites. 0:15:41.840 --> 0:15:44.240 And if you've ever played Plague, inc. You know that 0:15:44.280 --> 0:15:47.520 these are external objects that are capable of hanging onto 0:15:47.560 --> 0:15:52.520 and spreading disease. So when Native Americans contracted smallpox after 0:15:52.600 --> 0:15:56.040 being given blankets that had been used by smallpox patients, 0:15:56.360 --> 0:16:01.280 the blankets were fomites. However, some doctors already thought yellow 0:16:01.280 --> 0:16:05.120 fever was spread by mosquitoes before Walter Reid got involved. 0:16:05.600 --> 0:16:09.120 Cuban doctor Carlos Juan Finlay had first theorized that yellow 0:16:09.160 --> 0:16:12.560 fever was spread by mosquitoes as early as eighteen eighty one. 0:16:12.920 --> 0:16:16.120 He did a hundred and four different experiments between eighteen 0:16:16.160 --> 0:16:21.360 eighty one and to study the diseases spread. Most of 0:16:21.480 --> 0:16:25.400 Finlay's subjects were immigrant workers who allowed themselves to be 0:16:25.480 --> 0:16:29.320 bitten by mosquitoes that had bitten yellow fever patients. And 0:16:29.360 --> 0:16:31.600 it may seem kind of weird that people would be 0:16:31.640 --> 0:16:35.000 okay with this exposure without some kind of other incentive 0:16:35.240 --> 0:16:38.960 to to make it more enticing. But yellow fever was 0:16:39.040 --> 0:16:41.520 so widespread that pretty much everybody thought if you were 0:16:41.520 --> 0:16:44.680 in Havana long enough, you would eventually get it. So 0:16:44.800 --> 0:16:46.320 a lot of people were like, I might as well 0:16:46.360 --> 0:16:48.360 get it over with and actually have a doctor nearby 0:16:48.400 --> 0:16:51.480 if it's going to happen to me. Finlay even figured 0:16:51.480 --> 0:16:55.080 out which specific species he thought was at risk. This 0:16:55.160 --> 0:16:57.720 was a common household mosquito that the time was called 0:16:57.800 --> 0:17:01.800 q lex fasciatus, and now it's called eighties agip die 0:17:01.920 --> 0:17:05.600 and I hope I have pronounced that remotely right. But 0:17:06.080 --> 0:17:08.800 people did not take him seriously. This was in part 0:17:08.840 --> 0:17:12.320 because some of his experiments failed. He thought the mosquito 0:17:12.400 --> 0:17:15.119 bite was basically akin to a dirty needle. It was 0:17:15.160 --> 0:17:18.160 taking infected material from one person and putting it into 0:17:18.200 --> 0:17:21.840 another person. He also thought the sickest patients were going 0:17:21.880 --> 0:17:24.159 to be the ones most likely to transmit the disease 0:17:24.200 --> 0:17:29.240 to the mosquito. So this is not actually how yellow 0:17:29.280 --> 0:17:32.240 fever spreads, and we'll talk about that more in a moment, 0:17:32.320 --> 0:17:34.240 but that meant that, you know, a lot of his 0:17:34.880 --> 0:17:37.920 experiments did not result in somebody getting yellow fever, and 0:17:38.040 --> 0:17:41.120 people were sort of like, well, you're claiming it's the mosquitoes, 0:17:41.240 --> 0:17:43.480 but the mosquito, but that guy he's not sick, so 0:17:43.600 --> 0:17:47.080 you don't know what you're talking about. Walter Reid, for 0:17:47.160 --> 0:17:49.520 his part, worked with a team of other doctors, including 0:17:49.600 --> 0:17:54.679 Jesse Lizier, Aristides Eggramonte, and James Carroll. They worked not 0:17:54.760 --> 0:17:58.000 just off of Finlay's mosquito theory, but also off of 0:17:58.040 --> 0:18:02.159 actual mosquito eggs that Finlay collected. He figured out that 0:18:02.200 --> 0:18:04.760 if you dried out mosquito eggs, they would still hatch 0:18:04.800 --> 0:18:09.920 and mature with the right temperature and humidity. So, using 0:18:10.000 --> 0:18:14.119 Finlay's harvested mosquito eggs uh reading, his team ran a 0:18:14.119 --> 0:18:17.560 series of experiments. They hatched the mosquitoes from the eggs, 0:18:18.040 --> 0:18:20.040 and then they allowed them to bite someone who was 0:18:20.080 --> 0:18:23.680 infected with yellow fever. This is an extremely tedious, time 0:18:23.720 --> 0:18:26.879 consuming process. They would put the mosquito in a test tube, 0:18:27.320 --> 0:18:30.400 then put the test tube mouth down on somebody's skin, 0:18:30.840 --> 0:18:34.439 and then like wait for the mosquito to get to biting. Uh. 0:18:34.480 --> 0:18:36.679 They sort of tap the side of the test tube. 0:18:36.720 --> 0:18:40.360 If the mosquito was just perched on it not really 0:18:40.400 --> 0:18:44.520 doing anything, but really, this is like hurting cats. Mosquitoes 0:18:44.560 --> 0:18:47.959 do not feed on people on cue. This reminds me 0:18:48.000 --> 0:18:52.000 of an episode of UM, Why Am I blanking out? 0:18:52.080 --> 0:18:54.920 On the name of MythBusters. They were trying to get 0:18:54.920 --> 0:18:58.080 a skunk to spray them and they just couldn't. It's 0:18:58.200 --> 0:19:00.640 kind of like nature doesn't always do what you want 0:19:00.720 --> 0:19:03.840 in a lab like yes. Well, and it will also 0:19:03.960 --> 0:19:07.680 remind people of the saw Bones episode about self experimentation, 0:19:07.800 --> 0:19:11.360 because they talk about this part in in that episode. 0:19:11.359 --> 0:19:13.960 If you are a saw Bones fan, uh. And the 0:19:14.000 --> 0:19:17.040 team approached this in a methodical way, as methodical as 0:19:17.080 --> 0:19:18.880 you can be well trying to tap on a mosquito 0:19:18.920 --> 0:19:21.040 to get it to bite someone. Uh. And in a 0:19:21.080 --> 0:19:23.399 vast departure from much of the other research that we 0:19:23.480 --> 0:19:26.920 talked about on this podcast, they did not use unwilling 0:19:27.000 --> 0:19:30.880 organs and prisoners as test subjects. They used volunteers. These 0:19:30.880 --> 0:19:33.919 people gave their consent beforehand, and they were compensated for 0:19:33.960 --> 0:19:38.120 their participation a hundred dollars just for participating in another 0:19:38.280 --> 0:19:42.080 and another hundred dollars if they actually got stick. UM. 0:19:42.119 --> 0:19:47.160 This was basically revolutionary in the field of medical research. 0:19:47.240 --> 0:19:51.280 It's probably the first time that informed consent became a 0:19:51.359 --> 0:19:55.400 thing in Western medical study and research. And through these 0:19:55.440 --> 0:19:59.560 experiments they discovered a number of things about yellow fever transmission. 0:19:59.640 --> 0:20:03.359 In sting why some of Finley's experiments failed, it became 0:20:03.400 --> 0:20:05.919 clear as they went that mosquitoes could only pick up 0:20:05.960 --> 0:20:08.520 the virus from a sick person's blood two or three 0:20:08.600 --> 0:20:12.359 days after infection, and it took two weeks of for 0:20:12.600 --> 0:20:16.040 enough of the virus to reproduce inside the mosquito for 0:20:16.080 --> 0:20:18.359 someone it bit to get sick, so there was an 0:20:18.400 --> 0:20:21.600 incubation period that had not been accounted for, and after 0:20:21.680 --> 0:20:23.960 that the mosquito could then spread the disease for a 0:20:23.960 --> 0:20:26.720 couple of months. As a side note, this is why 0:20:26.840 --> 0:20:32.119 mosquitoes don't transmit HIV. HIV doesn't reproduce inside a mosquito's 0:20:32.160 --> 0:20:36.399 body the way yellow fever does. And this research was 0:20:36.720 --> 0:20:41.760 overwhelmingly successful, but it came at a cost. James Carroll, 0:20:41.840 --> 0:20:44.280 one of the researchers we mentioned earlier, was infected with 0:20:44.359 --> 0:20:47.920 yellow fever and he almost died. And this is reportedly 0:20:48.000 --> 0:20:51.280 because the mosquito in question had not eaten in about 0:20:51.280 --> 0:20:54.520 three days of them trying to coax it to bite someone, 0:20:55.160 --> 0:20:58.120 and they were afraid that if the mosquito starved to death, 0:20:58.160 --> 0:21:01.320 they were going to lose important data. So in sort 0:21:01.320 --> 0:21:05.240 of an act of desperation, what reportedly happened is that 0:21:05.320 --> 0:21:09.280 James Carroll let it bite him. There's this whole other 0:21:09.359 --> 0:21:11.800 weird thing in my head swirling about the idea of 0:21:12.480 --> 0:21:15.560 trying to keep mosquitoes as pets, almost for medical research, 0:21:15.600 --> 0:21:19.320 and it's very strange to think about. Um. And Jesse 0:21:19.480 --> 0:21:22.200 Lizier was infected with yellow fever, and he in fact 0:21:22.240 --> 0:21:25.680 did die. It's unclear whether this was part of an 0:21:25.680 --> 0:21:29.600 experiment or if this was an accident. Reports are contradictory. 0:21:29.720 --> 0:21:32.760 Some say that he did infect himself on purpose, and 0:21:32.800 --> 0:21:35.160 others say that he was bitten by a mosquito while 0:21:35.200 --> 0:21:37.359 working and thought it was a species that did not 0:21:37.480 --> 0:21:43.359 carry malaria. Regardless, his work before his death was absolutely 0:21:43.400 --> 0:21:47.919 critical to this experiment, and he left notebooks full of accurate, 0:21:48.080 --> 0:21:51.439 detailed data when he died, and without these notebooks the 0:21:51.560 --> 0:21:55.080 project probably would have failed. It could not have continued 0:21:55.200 --> 0:21:59.520 without his knowledge. Their research did not immediately gain traction. 0:21:59.600 --> 0:22:03.240 Back in the United States. An Italian doctor named Giuseppe 0:22:03.240 --> 0:22:07.480 Cinerelli had theorized that a basilus caused yellow fever, and 0:22:07.600 --> 0:22:11.520 even after this was disproved quite conclusively, he continued to 0:22:11.600 --> 0:22:15.000 insist that his basillas be named as the culprit. And 0:22:15.119 --> 0:22:18.720 this distracted from the real problem. Yeah, and when we 0:22:18.760 --> 0:22:24.159 say conclusively disproved, it involved things like during autopsies of 0:22:24.200 --> 0:22:28.200 people who had definitely died of yellow fever, his bacillus 0:22:28.400 --> 0:22:32.800 was not present and we were like, this is not it. 0:22:32.960 --> 0:22:37.320 But his advocacy for his basillus, which it was called 0:22:37.400 --> 0:22:45.119 his basillus um, really sidetracked things um. However, soon the 0:22:45.240 --> 0:22:49.080 army instituted mosquito control programs and yellow fever rates and 0:22:49.119 --> 0:22:53.879 Havannah plummeted. The United States Army was also soon able 0:22:53.920 --> 0:22:57.040 to get into areas where they previously couldn't because yellow 0:22:57.040 --> 0:22:59.600 fever was just too entrenched and basically trying to send 0:22:59.600 --> 0:23:02.720 troops there would have just caused everyone to get sick 0:23:02.760 --> 0:23:06.760 and die. Uh. An example is that the building of 0:23:06.800 --> 0:23:10.359 the Panama Canal really couldn't have happened without mosquito control 0:23:10.400 --> 0:23:14.360 programs to control the spread of yellow fever. Reid came 0:23:14.400 --> 0:23:16.960 back from Cuba in nineteen o one, and he continued 0:23:17.000 --> 0:23:20.320 to lecture on yellow fever. He received honorary degrees from 0:23:20.320 --> 0:23:24.000 Harvard and the University of Michigan. He was named librarian 0:23:24.119 --> 0:23:27.640 of the Surgeon General's Library in November of nineteen o two. 0:23:28.440 --> 0:23:31.879 Walter Reid died on November twenty three, nineteen o two, 0:23:31.960 --> 0:23:36.320 after developing parrotnitis, which followed a case of appendicitis, and 0:23:36.640 --> 0:23:39.439 his death came as somewhat of a shock. At least 0:23:39.520 --> 0:23:43.919 the illness is severity came as a shock. His symptoms 0:23:44.000 --> 0:23:47.359 just weren't as serious as would have been expected for 0:23:47.520 --> 0:23:50.520 a case of appendicitis that was advanced as advanced as 0:23:50.600 --> 0:23:53.960 his was, so uh when he became when it became 0:23:54.200 --> 0:23:57.120 clear that he was critically ill, people were really shocked 0:23:57.160 --> 0:24:01.119 by it. A vaccine for yellow feed or was developed 0:24:01.240 --> 0:24:05.560