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Some volunteers slept for weeks in the blood-soaked, vomit-stained faecal-contaminated nightgowns of recently deceased disease victims.
Others allowed themselves to be bitten mercilessly by (uninfected) mosquitoes.
I asked two volunteers, Private John R. Kissinger and clerk John J. Moran, why they were agreeing to such life-threatening experiments. They said "We volunteer solely for the cause of humanity and in the interest of science".
None of these subjects came down with yellow fever.
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"Those three men opened the tightly-nailed, suspicious-looking boxes. They opened those boxes inside that house, in air already too sticky for proper breathing. Phew! There were cursings, there were holdings of noses. But they went on opening those boxes, and out of them Cooke and Folk and Jernegan took pillows, soiled with the black vomit of men dead of yellow fever; out of them they took sheets and blankets, dirty with the discharges of dying men past helping themselves. They beat those pillows and shook those sheets and blankets - "you must see the yellow fever poison is well spread around that room!" Walter Reed had told them. Then Cooke and Folk and Jernegan made up their little army cots with those pillows and blankets and sheets. They undressed. They lay down on those filthy beds. They tried to sleep - in that room fouler than the dankest of mediaeval dungeons! And Walter Reed and James Carroll guarded that little house, tenderly, to see no mosquito got into it." |