REED, WALTER (1851-1902), American bacteriologist, was born in Gloucester county, Va., on Sept. 13, 1851, and was educated at the University of Virginia and Bellevue Medical school (M.D., 187o). In 1874 he entered the medical corps of the U.S. army as assistant surgeon, with rank of lieutenant. In 1893 he was promoted to surgeon, with the rank of major, and made pro fessor of bacteriology in the newly-organized Army Medical school. In 1898, when the Spanish American War opened, he was appointed chairman of a committee to investigate the causation and mode of propagation of typhoid fever, an epidemic of which had broken out among the soldiers. His Report on the Origin and Spread of Typhoid Fever in U.S. Military Camps (1904) revealed a number of points concerning the disease not before known, and emphasized others which had been little appreciated. In 1897 he and an associate proved the theory of Sanerelli—that the ba cillus icteroides was the specific cause of yellow fever—erroneous. In 1899, when the disease was especially severe in Cuba, he was made chairman of a committee to investigate its cause and method of transmission. His observation of many cases led him to dis
count the then prevalent idea that the disease was transmitted by fomites in bedding, clothing, etc., of patients suffering from yellow fever, and to revive the discarded notion of Dr. Carlos Finley that the yellow fever parasite was carried only by mos quitoes. Since the disease was not taken by animals there was no method of proof except by experiment upon human beings. By a thorough set of experiments, in which some of Reed's co workers sacrificed their lives for the cause, he proved to a sceptical world that the yellow fever parasite was carried only by the mos quito Stegomyia fasciata and that its bite caused the disease only under certain conditions. Possessed of this knowledge, American sanitary engineers eradicated the yellow fever from Cuba, and it has since been largely eliminated from civilized portions of the world. Reed died at Washington, D.C., on Nov. 23, 1902.
See H. A. Kelly, Walter Reed and Yellow Fever (1906), which contains a bibliography of Reed's publications; also P. De Kruif, Microbe Hunters, pp. (1926).