On Walter Reed and Yellow Fever

On Walter Reed and Yellow Fever: Born in Virginia 1851, Reed earned his first medical degree by age 18. He understood at an early age that treating patients for disease was important, but researching and finding the origins of particular diseases was supreme. After Reed joined the U.S. Army as a medical officer, he was named one of the first professors of bacteriology (which was an emerging clinical field at the time). When the Spanish-American War erupted in 1898, many soldiers started dying from yellow fever. There were two prevailing theories in the 1890s about how people became infected with yellow fever. One was that yellow fever transmitted through physical contact while the other was that mosquitoes carried the disease. Reed set up an experiment (in Cuba) to figure out how the disease spread. In two separate tents, Reed placed soldiers under different circumstances. One tent had bed-clothing from troops with yellow fever while the other had mosquitoes in it. Needless to say, the troops in the mosquito-laden tent came down with the disease while the others did not. It was a breakthrough in the field of virology, as blood had now become a primary culprit in the transfer of disease.