Sanitation -- Cuba -- Havana; Sanitation -- Panama; Yellow fever -- Cuba -- Havana
About the same time an officer of the Public Health Service, Dr. H.
R. Carter, was making in Mississippi his epoch-marking observations
upon the extrinsic incubation of yellow fever. Measured by the
results produced, this was one of the most important papers ever
written. Yet as high an authority as the Surgeon-General of the
Public Health Service expected the greatest results to flow from the
conclusions reached by this Board, and did not notice the report from
his subordinate concerning the extrinsic incubation of yellow fever.
The conclusions of his Board turned out to be all wrong and useless
as to results. The report of Carter turned out to be pure gold, and
was one of the great steps in establishing the true method of the
transmission of yellow fever. I do not say this in criticism. It
is almost impossible for contemporaries to judge the true value of
discoveries, or to give the proper position to the men of their own
time who make these discoveries.
General George M. Sternberg, the then Surgeon-General of the Army,
was one of the leading bacteriologists of the profession, and was
also one of the best known authorities on yellow fever. He doubted
the findings of this Board, and obtained authority from the Secretary
of War to appoint a board of Army medical officers to investigate
this same subject. He appointed on this now famous and immortal board
Reed, Lazear, Carroll and Agramonte. They came to Havana, and spent
several months in investigating Sanarelli’s organism. They proved
beyond peradventure that it had no causative relation to yellow
fever, and identified it as a well-recognized organism.
It is an interesting historical fact that one of the yellow-fever
patients in whom the Board of Public Health Service found Sanarelli’s
organism was a patient of mine. He was a soldier, Private Patrick
Smith, Eighth Infantry, a non-immune living in an infected part of
Havana, so that I thought that he ought to be reported as a suspect.
The case continued nine days, long enough to convince me clinically
that the disease was not yellow fever. The symptoms in a case of
yellow fever dying on the ninth day are always so well marked that
the diagnosis should not be in doubt. But the Board found Sanarelli’s
organism, and being themselves convinced that this was the organism
of yellow fever, they believed the case to be that disease. It shows
the necessity in scientific matters of being on one’s guard, and of
approaching investigation with an open mind.
The Army Board having satisfied themselves that Sanarelli’s organism
bore no relation to yellow fever, but was simply the ordinary
hog-cholera bacillus, turned their attention to other matters, though
they were always working in relation to yellow fever. They spent a
great deal of time in examining the intestinal flora in cases of
recognized yellow fever, but could find nothing that seemed to have
any relation to this disease in a causative sense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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