Walter Reed : a memoir / Walter Drew McCaw.

  • McCaw, Walter Drew.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Walter Reed : a memoir / Walter Drew McCaw. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    WALTER REED. A MEMOIR. It is given to but few scientific men to lay bare a secret of nature materially affecting the prosperity of nations, and the lives, fortunes and happiness of thousands. Fewer still succeed in so quickly convincing brother scientists and men in authority of the truth of their discoveries that their own eyes behold the glorious result of their labor. Of the fifty-one years of Walter Reed’s industrious, blameless life, twelve only were spent in the study of the special branch of science in which he became famous, but his name now stands with those of Jenner, Lister and Morton, as among the benefac- tors of humanity. Walter Reed was born in Gloucester County, Virginia, Septem- ber 13, 1851, the son of the Rev. Lemuel Sutton Reed and Pharaba White, his wif e The circumstances of his family were modest, and some of the years of his boyhood were spent in a much troubled section of the south during the great civil war. He acquired, however, a good preliminary education, and at an age when most boys are still in the schoolroom, he began the study of medicine at the University of Virginia, graduating as M. D. in 1868, when only seventeen years old. A second medical degree was received later from Bellevue Med- ical College, New York, and then came terms of service in the Brooklyn City Hospital, and the City Hospital, Blackwell’s Island. Before the age of twenty-one, Reed was a district physician in New York city, and at twenty-two one of the five inspectors of the Board of Health of Brooklyn. He entered the Army of the United States as Assistant Surgeon with the rank of First Lieutenant, in 1875, and for the next eigh-