This collection was given to the University of Virginia Library by Mary Kahler Hench, widow of Philip S. Hench.

Walter Reed wrote the following to his wife Emilie on December 31, 1900: "Only 10 minutes of the old century remain, lovie, dear. Here I have been sitting reading that most wonderful book, La Roche on Yellow Fever, written in 1853. Forty-seven years later it has been permitted to me and my assistants to lift the impenetrable veil that has surrounded the causation of this most dreadful pest of humanity and to put it on a rational and scientific basis. I thank God that this has been accomplished during the latter days of the old century. May its cure be wrought out in the early days of the new century! The prayer that has been mine for twenty or more years that I might be permitted in some way or sometime to do something to alleviate human suffering has been answered!" Reed's own, deeply emotional words echo through the century and speak directly to the importance of his discovery and its impact on humankind.

In 1900, the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission, headed by Walter Reed, made a dramatic discovery and achieved a great breakthrough in medicine for which Reed was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and elevated to the status of health hero in the popular press and imagination. At experimental stations just outside Havana, Major Walter Reed and the other members of the Yellow Fever Commission -- James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and Jesse Lazear -- proved that the Aedes aegypti mosquito was the vector for the yellow fever virus. Their work in Cuba destroyed the popular notion that yellow fever spread by direct contact with infected people or "contaminated" objects and focused the people's efforts on the eradication of the Aedes mosquito. The discovery of the vector for transmission of yellow fever and the immediate implementation of eradication programs had a dramatic effect on the health of both civilians and soldiers. Relatively few men were killed in action during the brief Spanish-American War of 1898. After the Maine explosion, 968 American soldiers were killed in actual combat. However, over five thousand soldiers died of disease. Yellow fever was the most feared of the many diseases that swept through the American camps: its mortality rate was known to reach eighty-five percent.

Yellow fever had been a scourge that had had significant effects on social life and local economies in the United States throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the height of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, labor was in short supply, commerce slowed to a fraction of its usual pace, and merchants, especially those whose goods were perishable, suffered heavy losses. This combination of factors accelerated the city's decline and loss of place to New York City as the key port of the United States. Between 1817 and 1900, yellow fever had struck nearly every summer in cities on the southeastern and Gulf coasts. New Orleans was yellow fever's favorite American target. The New Orleans epidemic of 1853 killed nine thousand people. After city authorities incorporated the Reed team's discoveries, New Orleans suffered only one yellow fever epidemic--the epidemic of 1905, the last outbreak of yellow fever in the United States. The control of Aedes and the subsequent elimination of yellow fever in America saved innumerable lives and millions of dollars in commercial losses.

Walter Reed, the public health hero who was lionized for his discovery of the cause and transmission of yellow fever and whose work saved lives and commerce, was born in Gloucester County, Virginia, on September 13, 1851, the fifth child born to Lemuel Sutton Reed, a Methodist minister, and Pharaba White Reed, both from North Carolina. In 1866 when Walter was fifteen years old the Reed family moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. Reed entered the University of Virginia at the age of sixteen. He completed the requirements and graduated from the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1869, as the youngest graduate ever from that program. He left Charlottesville for New York City, where he matriculated at Bellevue Hospital Medical College. Following completion of his program of primarily clinical study at Bellevue, he moved on to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn and then to a residency at Brooklyn City Hospital. His appointment to the Brooklyn Board of Health as an assistant sanitary officer at the age of twenty-two introduced him to his future career in public health and disease control and prevention.

It was at this time that he met his future wife, Emily (Emilie) Lawrence, from Murfreesboro, North Carolina. His letters to her begin in 1874 and continue for the rest of his life. His was a voluminous correspondence and his letters were full of both professional and personal details. He writes Emilie long letters full of information about parties and scientific experiments; he tells her of his hopes and dreams and shares with her news of his successes and failures.

Reed was granted his commission in the United States Army Medical Corps in 1875. After serving as an army surgeon at remote sites in the West, Reed was assigned to Baltimore's Fort McHenry in October of 1890. The Fort McHenry assignment allowed Reed to participate in a seven-month pathology and bacteriology course at Johns Hopkins Hospital. There he worked with Dr. William Welch in the pathology of typhoid fever and on the identification of the hog cholera bacillus. Army Surgeon-General George Miller Sternberg was impressed by Reed's work at Johns Hopkins. In 1893 he appointed Reed Professor of Clinical and Sanitary Microscopy at the new Army Medical School in Washington, with a joint appointment as curator of the Army Medical Museum. One of Reed's first projects in Washington was collaborating with Sternberg on a smallpox vaccine study. In 1895, Reed studied an outbreak of malaria near Washington. He observed that the marshlands played some role in the spread of malaria, yet he dismissed the suggestion that mosquitoes carried the disease. In 1898, following the declaration of war on Spain, Sternberg selected Reed, Victor Vaughan, and E.O. Shakespeare to examine the American military camps in order to ascertain the cause of the typhoid epidemic. They concluded that typhoid was the result of filthy living conditions. Two years later, Sternberg made Reed officer-in-charge of the Yellow Fever Commission.

For a listing of the numerous personal names, ca. 1,500, and geographic places encompassed by this collection please use the Web site menu options "Who's Who: Master List Of Personal Names For The Walter Reed Digitization Project" and "Places: Places Found In The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Documents

Scope and Content

The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection in the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library is 72 linear feet (147 boxes). Ca. 5,500 items, 18xx-19xx, from this collection were selected for digitization, transcription, and mark up for access via the Web. The correspondence of Walter Reed constitutes the majority of personal letters selected; the numerous letters Reed wrote his wife provide a fascinating first-hand look at Reed throughout his life. Also selected are materials of Jesse Lazear, James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, Henry Rose Carter, Jefferson Randolph Kean, Army Surgeon-General George Miller Sternberg, Leonard Wood, William Crawford Gorgas, and others who took part in the yellow fever studies in Cuba 1900-1901. There is also material concerning Philip S. Hench, M.D., and his research in the history of the yellow fever studies.

The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection includes personal and official correspondence, photographs, maps, reprints of scientific articles, newspaper clippings, and various artifacts such as the fever charts of the volunteers in the yellow fever experiments in Cuba and the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded posthumously to Walter Reed. Dr. Philip S. Hench, awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of cortisone, resolved to document every aspect of the "Conquest of Yellow-Fever" and to write a much needed accurate and comprehensive history.

For twenty years Hench tirelessly combed through public archive collections and personal papers in the United States and Cuba. He met and interviewed surviving participants of the experiments and others associated with the project, as well as family members of the Yellow Fever Commission. He sought out physicians and scientists who had worked with the principal players or who had applied the results in the campaign to eradicate yellow fever. He identified and photographed sites associated with the yellow fever story, and he successfully petitioned politicians in the United States and Cuba to commemorate the work. In the process, Hench became the trusted friend and advisor of many of these same individuals, and they, in turn, presented him with much of the surviving original material for safekeeping.

In short, Hench came to be the world's expert on the yellow fever story and the steward of thousands of original letters and documents. His premature death at age 69 found him still hoping to uncover important missing evidence, his book unwritten. Hench's widow Mary Kahler Hench gave his yellow fever collection to the University of Virginia, Walter Reed's alma mater, and this extensive personal archive forms the most detailed and accurate record available on the Conquest of Yellow Fever.

Some avenues for exploration using the collection include the history of medicine and science, social history, military history, biographical information on the principal players in an astonishingly successful public health investigation and campaign, the history of family and interpersonal relationships in the nineteenth century, tropical medicine, and biomedical ethics.

The name of Walter Reed has become synonymous with self-experimentation in medicine. Informed consent is also a hallmark of the Yellow Fever Commission. The Commission needed human subjects in order to test the mosquito theory because, at the time, no one knew of any animals susceptible to the disease. The commissioners agreed to experiment on themselves before requesting volunteers. Several Spanish immigrants participated in the experiments, but the majority of volunteers came from Lieutenant Albert E. Truby's Hospital Detachment at Camp Columbia. Governor-General Leonard Wood authorized Reed to offer the volunteers a $100 gold piece. To a poor Spanish immigrant or an underpaid army private, this was considerable incentive. Added to this was the likelihood of contracting yellow fever naturally during their assignment in Cuba, a point that Reed emphasized in the consent form. Reed said it would be better to contract yellow fever in a controlled environment where one could receive immediate medical attention from reputable physicians than to unexpectedly develop yellow fever in a remote camp where adequate care was unlikely. Even so, Reed stated the possibility that volunteers might die during the experiment. The members of the Yellow Fever Commission are considered the first advocates of informed consent because of their conscientious approach to human experimentation.