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Impact of the Commission’s Findings
Introduction | Politics | In Cuba | Commission | Mosquitos | New Strategies | Impact | Credits
- Letter from Walter Reed to his wife, Emilie written on December 9, 1900.
- Hench-Reed Collection, Historical Collections & Services, CMHSL
Reed knew that his team’s results were monumental: “It has been permitted to me & 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… . 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!” (31 December 1900). In a letter to Major Gorgas, Reed claimed that his team’s work and Gorgas’s sanitation efforts had restored the reputation of the U.S. Army Medical Department, which had “got such a black eye during the Spanish-American War.” He praised his team’s discovery with even greater enthusiasm in a letter to his wife, Emilie: “Rejoice with me, sweetheart, as aside from the antitoxin of Diphtheria and Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus, it will be regarded as the most important piece of work, scientifically, during the 19th Century.”
Guantánamo Bay
- Guantánamo Bay is highlighted in this map of eastern Cuba. The United States Naval Station established there in 1902 is still in use.
- Hench-Reed Collection, Historical Collections & Services, CMHSL
Regardless of its place in nineteenth-century science, the work of the Reed Commission, combined with that of Gorgas’s sanitation department, made Cuba a safer place for Americans. In March of 1901, Congress stipulated the conditions for American withdrawal from Cuba in the “Platt Amendment,” which demanded rights to a permanent American naval base at Guantánamo Bay and arranged for American supervision of Cuba’s political and economic affairs. The Cuban government accepted. On May 20, 1902, “The Republic of Cuba” was established under President Tomás Estrada Palma.
The Panama Canal
- “The First Mountain to be Removed.”
- Engraving in Harper’s Weekly, July 1905, by W.A. Rogers. Print acquired by Philip S. Hench from Bettmann Archive
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt incorporated the Reed Commission’s discovery into his Panama Canal plan. He had learned from the failed French attempt to dig an isthmian canal that yellow fever and malaria would be the major impediments to the American canal project. He reasoned that the same anti-mosquito measures that had wiped out yellow fever in Cuba and the United States would be equally effective in Panama.
Unfortunately, Walter Reed was not able to see his work facilitate construction of the famous canal. Reed had died on November 23, 1902, from appendicitis. President Roosevelt’s canal commissioners selected Reed’ colleague Colonel William C. Gorgas to lead the anti-mosquito campaign. Gorgas and his long-time associate Henry Rose Carter waged a ten-year war on Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes and checked the spread of yellow fever and malaria in the Canal Zone.
Later Discoveries
Finlay, Reed, Gorgas, and their many associates cleared the path for other students of yellow fever. Scientists later discovered, for example, that several species of Aedes besides aegypti carry the disease. They also found another yellow fever carrying mosquito, the Haemagogus, which transmits yellow fever to humans and monkeys in the jungles of Central and South America.
Carroll’s “filterable agent” theory led to the isolation of the virus and the development of the 17D vaccine in 1937. Anti-mosquito measures and the vaccine have saved many thousands of lives in all parts of the globe. However, the recent resurgence of yellow fever, particularly in Africa, requires the continued control of the mosquito population and wider dissemination of the vaccine.
To Find Out More…
To access the Hench-Reed Collection and learn more about yellow fever or the history of yellow fever research, schedule an appointment with Historical Collections & Services of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia.
For permission to reproduce any of the text or images owned by Historical Collections and Services, please contact Joan Echtenkamp Klein, Assistant Director for Historical Collections and Services, by e-mail at jre@virginia.edu; by phone 434-924-0052; by fax 434-243-5873; by mail at The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia Health System, P.O. Box 800722, Charlottesville, VA 22908-0722.