CHAPTER VII
Triumph Over Typhoid
Writing in 1906, Maj. Jefferson Randolph Kean declared that "Typhoid fever is today, on account of its wide dissemination, the persistent vitality of its infecting organism, the duration and severity of its attack and its large death rate, the most formidable infectious disease with which we have to contend in military life." 1[1]
Of this fact, the Nation had had melancholy proof in 1898, during and after the war with Spain. Hostilities with Spain ended with the signing of the peace protocol on 12 August of that year, but there was no treaty of peace with a more insidious enemy, the Bacillus typhosus, as it was then called, or Salmonella typhosa, to give the microorganism its present-day name. Typhoid fever struck one out of every five soldiers in the national encampments within the United States, with a date rate of more than 7½ percent of those stricken.2[2]
To the study of this epidemic, Surgeon General George M. Sternberg assigned Maj. Walter Reed of the Regular Army, Curator of the Army Medical Museum, and two surgeons of the Volunteers— Maj. Victor C. Vaughan, dean of the Medical School of the University of Michigan, and an epidemiologist and microbiologist of note, with special experience in the examination of water supplies, and Maj. Edward O. Shakespeare of Philadelphia who, as special commissioner from the United States, had studied cholera epidemics in Spain and India.
The new Board, set up by General Orders No. 194, Adjutant General's Office, on 18 August 1898, lost no time in getting to work. On 20 August, they were at Camp Alger at Dunn Loring, Va., near Washington. There they found hundreds of cases of fever which they believed to be typhoid, but which most of the medical officers in attendance had diagnosed as malaria.
- ↑ 1 Kean, Jefferson R.: The Prevention of Disease in the Army (The Seaman Prize Essay). The Military Surgeon 18: 13, 1906.
- ↑ 2 Reed, W., Vaughan, V. C, and Shakespeare, E. O.: The Origin and Spread of Typhoid Fever in United States Military Camps During the Spanish War of 1898. Volume 1. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904, p. 674.
