Walter Reed

Walter Reed was born in Belroi, Virginia, the son of a Methodist minister. He earned a medical degree from the University of Virginia at seventeen and a second from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York. In 1875 he joined the U.S. Army Medical Corps and served for years at frontier posts in the West, where he cared for soldiers, settlers and Native Americans. He later studied bacteriology and became a professor at the Army Medical School. In the Spanish-American War, far more American soldiers died of disease than in battle, and in 1900 Reed was sent to Cuba to lead a commission on yellow fever. Following the theory of the Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay, the commission tested whether the disease was carried by mosquitoes. In carefully controlled experiments, with volunteers who gave written consent, they showed that the Aedes aegypti mosquito spreads yellow fever and that it is not spread by contact with clothing or bedding. A commission member, Jesse Lazear, died after being bitten. Mosquito control then nearly ended the disease in Havana and helped make the Panama Canal possible. Reed died in 1902.

Faith: Son of a Methodist minister. Source: Wikipedia