There have been many selfless people in the history of medical science. People who should be remembered not only for the work they actually achieved, but also for all they willingly sacrificed in order to help others. These are people who were fully aware that the work they were doing was more important than their own health or even their own lives.
Perhaps the most striking example of sacrifice in the name of science is the case of the deadly Yellow Fever.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, the treacherous disease Yellow Fever had killed untold thousands upon thousands (probably even millions, though records have not always been as thorough as they are now) of people throughout history. The army Napoleon sent to France in 1802 to quell the Haitian Rebellion was almost entirely decimated by the disease. The death of most of these forty thousand troops became a major instigating event which would lead up to Napoleon agreeing to the Louisiana Purchase. Entire cities and even countries, mostly in tropical or subtropical regions, had felt the powerful wrath of the epidemic.
The disease had ravaged the French once again during their original attempt at building the first Panama Canal (an attempt which failed quite miserably, in part due to the disease), and up until the 1890's was wrongly believed by most leading scientists to be spread by contact with an infected person, rather than through the bite of a mosquito, which led to many attempts at quelling the disease through isolation and quarantine, with less than perfect success.
This is where the brave medical scientists enter into the picture.
The medical researchers who teamed up with Dr. Walter Reed (whose name lives on in the form of a very prestigious medical facility in Washington D.C.) around the turn of the century to prove once and for all that Yellow Fever was the result of infected mosquitoes rather than infected people were some of the most dedicated people of science the world would ever seen.
While some might say (perhaps accurately) that these researchers, in addition to being heroic and courageous, were also rather foolhardy, the result of their science was the saving of countless lives.
The theory of mosquitoes being the cause of Yellow Fever had been first set forth in Cuba by Dr. Carlos Finlay in 1881, and it was this theory which Dr. Reed and his associates set out to prove once and for all. Finlay had been having trouble in proving his theory due to the very delicate process of the transmission of Yellow Fever, which doctors now realize goes something like this:
A) A person is infected with Yellow Fever by a mosquito.
B) If a mosquito sucks the blood of that person within the incubation period of about three days of their having contracted the disease, the mosquito is able to pass the disease on. Anytime after this narrow window, any blood sucked by a mosquito will consequently be harmless to others.
C) Once the mosquito has sucked the diseased blood, it must wait another twelve to twenty days before the infection can be transmitted to another person.
For all of Dr. Finlay's research, he had not been able to decipher this final fact, and was simply performing his tests too soon. It was this frustration which caused so many scientists to believe that mosquitoes must not be the culprits after all.
This is the myth Dr. Reed and his team sought to decry.
And they did so in a most disagreeable way.
The first member of Dr. Reed's team to fall ill from Yellow Fever after having subjected himself (yes, on purpose) to the bite of a mosquito was Dr. James Carroll in 1900, who grew rather ill from the disease, but eventually recovered. In September of that same year, another willing servant of medicine, Dr. Jesse W. Lazear, allowed himself to be bitten as well. Before too long, Dr. Lazear suffered from one of the most violent cases of Yellow Fever many people had ever seen, and died on September 25th, among such wild delirium that it took two men to hold him down. Indeed, these were just two of the selfless servants of medicine who helped the world find an answer to this disease which had so ravaged the tropics.
Perhaps the most tragic of all of Dr. Reed's cases was that of Clara Maass, a faithful nurse who, like her colleagues, selflessly allowed herself to be bitten by mosquitoes in the name of science. She came down with a mild case of Yellow Fever in March of 1901, but quickly recovered. Pleased at the success of her experiment, and falsely believing that the body would become immune to Yellow Fever as it would Smallpox or Chicken Pox, Clara allowed herself to be exposed to another infected mosquito in August of that year.
Unfortunately, these particular views of Yellow Fever turned out to be tragically incorrect, and Clara Maass, not at all immune to the disease, contracted Yellow Fever again, on August 18th. On August 26th, Clara died, the most public of all the yellow fever deaths. The Walter Reed commission was forced to end all human testing of Yellow Fever and resort to other, presumably safer, methods instead. But the good work had already been done. Mosquitoes were surely the cause.
Clara Maass was honored by being inducted into the Nursing Hall of Fame, as well as the honor of having her image on postage stamps in both Cuba and the United States. Probably a small consolation, however, for having paid such a price.
This sort of thing doesn't happen very often these days, what with all the government regulation and red tape (which is probably a good thing in this instance). But one should still stop every once in a while and remember these brave people and the sacrifices they made.
They may have been naive, but they were heroes, nonetheless.
References:
McCollough, David. "The Path Between the Seas." Simon and Schuster. 1978
