Typhoid and the Medical Museum
The question could be settled only by microscopic pathological examination, and there was not a microscope in the camp. Authority to set up a diagnostic laboratory in each camp was requested and was granted. Doctors William M. Gray and James Carroll of the staff of the Army Medical Museum were assigned to the laboratory at Camp Alger, the first to be established. Later, after the troops left Alger, the activity was transferred to Fort Myer, Va., and afterward to Jacksonville, Fla. 3[1]
The Typhoid Board's first stop on its tour of inspection of campsites and surroundings was at Fernandina, Fla., reached on 26 August. By the end of September, the Board had visited camps at Jacksonville, Fla.; Huntsville, Ala.; Chickamauga National Park, Ga.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Montauk Point, Long Island; and Harrisburg, Pa. 4[2] On much of their journey, they traveled and lived in an office car provided for their use by the Southern Railway." 5[3]
The early differences in diagnosis between the Board and the local medical officers, first evident at Camp Alger, persisted. At Jacksonville, where the VII Army Corps was encamped, the dominant diagnosis for the fevers was malaria for the milder cases, and typhomalaria for the more severe. The Reed- Vaughan-Shakespeare Board was convinced, from the clinical evidence, that many such cases were typhoid. They persuaded Brig. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, in command of the camp, to order that 50 cases diagnosed by the camp medical officers as malaria or typhomalaria be sent to Fort Myer, where Dr. Carroll had set up his diagnostic laboratory, for microscopic tests. The tests, in every instance, showed the true diagnosis to be typhoid fever.
Being still unconvinced by the tests of a microscopist working for the Typhoid Board, further tests were made on a larger number of men, sent to major civilian hospitals in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Cleveland— and again the tests showed that the correct diagnosis was typhoid fever.6[4]
By September, the bacteriologic laboratory was in operation at Chickamauga National Park, where 60,000 soldiers had been encamped during the summer, and where camp fever had been so prevalent that there was a dis-
