The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

Associated with Reed were Dr. James Carroll, Dr. Aristides Agramonte, and Dr. Jesse W. Lazear. Late in August, a few days after he had allowed a mosquito to bite him, Dr. Carroll fell ill with yellow fever, and though he recovered, his health was so damaged that he died a few years later. In mid-September, while placing mosquitoes on patients in a fever ward, Lazear saw a free mosquito of undetermined species land on his hand and he also purposefully allowed the insect to take its feed of blood. Five days later Lazear had what Gorgas described as one of the most violent cases of yellow fever he had ever attended. On September 25, the day Lazear died, he was in such wild delirium that it took two men to hold him in bed. Convinced now of the truth of Finlay’s theory, Reed pressed on with further experiments proving conclusively that Stegomyia fasciata was the carrier, and that neither filth nor “fomites,” the term used for the soiled clothes or bedding of yellow-fever patients, had anything whatever to do with spreading the disease. For twenty nights, as part of one experiment, a doctor and three volunteer soldiers, confined to a one-room shack, slept in the soiled pajamas of yellow-fever patients, on beds reeking of black vomit and other excreta; and for all the discomfort of the experience, none of them suffered the least sign of illness.