biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1851–1902)
|
| biography:
| Physician and soldier, born in Belroi, Virginia, USA. He received a medical degree from the University of Virginia (1869) and served an internship in Brooklyn. Commissioned assistant surgeon (1875), he spent 11 years in frontier garrison posts. A transfer in 1890 gave him the opportunity to pursue bacteriological research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and he became professor of bacteriology at the newly established Army Medical School (1893). In 1897 he began the study of the transmission of yellow fever, the work for which he is remembered, and headed the army's Yellow Fever Commission, which investigated outbreaks of the disease in army camps in Cuba. Experimenting on volunteers, with his colleagues (including Jesse Lazear and James Carroll) he proved conclusively that the Aedes aegypti mosquito was responsible for spreading yellow fever. Attacks on mosquito breeding places cut the number of cases from 1400 in Havana in 1900 to 37 in all of Cuba the following year. Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC is named in his honour. |
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