hich came to be known as the
Yellow Fever Commission, was composed of Drs. Walter Reed, James
Carroll, Jessie W. Lazear and Aristides Agramonte of the United States
Army. Agramonte was a Cuban and an immune, the others were non-immunes.
Dr. Manson in his lectures on Tropical Medicines says of them:

"I cannot pass on, however, to what I have to say in connection
with this work without a word of admiration for the insight, the
energy, the skill, the courage, and withal the modesty and
simplicity of the leader of that remarkable band of workers. If any
man deserved a monument to his memory, it was Reed. If any band of
men deserve recognition at the hands of their countrymen, it is
Reed's colleagues."

Their first work was to determine whether any of the germs that had been
claimed to be the cause of yellow fever were really responsible for the
disease. _Bacillus icteroides_ that for some time and by some
investigators had been named as the offender was particularly
investigated, but was proved to be a secondary invader only.

Dr. Charles Finlay of Havana had been claiming for some years that the
yellow fever was transmitted by means of the mosquito and possibly by
other insects also. He even claimed to have proved this theory
experimentally. We know now, however, that there must have been errors
in his experiments and that his patients became infected from sources
other than those he was dealing with.

The Yellow Fever Commission decided to put this theory to the test and
secured a number of volunteers for the experiments. The first thing was
to let an infected mosquito bite some non-immune person. How this was
done and the results, may be told in Dr. Carroll's own words.

EXPERIMENTS

"Two separate lines of work now presented: one, the study of the
bacterial flora of the intestine and anaerobic cultures from the
blood and various organs; the other, the theory of the transmission
of the disease by the mosquito, which had been advanced by Dr.
Carlos Finlay in 1881. After due consideration it was decided to
investigate the latter first. Then arose the question of the
tremendous responsibility involved in the use of human beings for
experimental purposes. It was concluded that the results
themselves, if positive, would be sufficient justification of the
undertaking. It was suggested that we subject ourselves to the same
risk an