of Murfreesboro, N.C., to marry him and felt that the prospects of establishing a sufficiently assured private practice, which he said depended "more on his beard than on his brains," were not sufficiently promising to sustain the venture. He succeeded in passing the examinations, was commissioned a first lieutenant, and won his bride.
There followed 4 years of frontier service in Arizona, and a year at Fort McHenry, Baltimore, where he took advantage of the opportunity to study physiology at Johns Hopkins. The next 5 years were spent in Nebraska, after which he had a tour of 2 years at Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. In 1889, Reed was back in Baltimore as attending surgeon and examiner of recruits, with permission of Surgeon General Jedediah H. Baxter to pursue such courses at Hopkins as would be of practical benefit to any army surgeon, but not to take laboratory courses. After General Baxter's death, Captain Reed was permitted to take courses in pathology and bacteriology — subjects which were to determine the direction of his future career.
After 2 years more of frontier service in the Dakotas, Reed was named to the positions in the Medical Museum and the School which he held at the time of his appointment to investigate yellow fever— the appointment which he was to make of such shining service to medicine and mankind. 9[1]
James Carroll (fig. 42) was born in England in 1854, emigrated to Canada at the age of 15, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1874 at the age of 20. Twelve years later, he took advantage of a tour of duty in New York to begin his medical education, which he finished with the degree of M.D. from the University of Maryland, earned while stationed in Baltimore in 1891. Postgraduate work in bacteriology and pathology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital followed, in 1892 and 1893. In the latter year, he was assigned to the Museum, where he served with the rank of Hospital Steward until 1898, when he became Acting Assistant Surgeon. 10[2]
Jesse William Lazear (fig. 43), the third member of the Yellow Fever Board, was born in 1866 in Baltimore, where he graduated in academic studies
- ↑ 9 Reed's career up to the time of the creation of the Yellow Fever Board is based on Kelly, op. cit., chapters I, II, and III, and upon Maj. Jefferson Randolph Kean's memoir, included in Senate Document 822, 61st Congress, 3d session, 1911, pp. 14-16 and 38-40. Major Kean refers in these memoirs to a little Indian girl who had been so badly burned in a campfire that she had been abandoned to die by her people, but whom Dr. Reed had rescued and saved, taking her into his home for rearing. The story is told in greater detail in an account of an interview, with Miss Blossom Reed, the major's daughter, at her home at Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., on the 109th anniversary of his birthday, which appeared in the Washington Daily News of 14 September 1960.
- ↑ 10 (1) Kelly, op. cit., pp. 262, 263. (2) Lamb, D. S.: A History of the Army Medical Museum. 1862-1917, compiled from the Official Records. Mimeographed copy in historical records of AFIP, p. 114.
