If Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer was the anti-hero of director Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, portrayed by Matt Damon, is his equally controversial counterpart.

Tasked with staffing what would eventually become known as the Manhattan Project, Damon’s character is the dutiful Army servant given the dubious honor of presiding over a team of brilliant scientists who in no way conform to the military’s notions of hierarchy.

“The frustration [for] Groves — what he lived with as a military person — he suddenly finds himself in charge of a bunch of civilians who don’t really recognize the chain of command,” Damon told Military Times.

In a serious film about one of the most devastating weapons ever created, Damon manages to bring a bit of levity via the near-comical level of rigidity with which he portrays Groves.

“I would have played anything that Chris asked me to,” Damon said. “But Groves was really fun because I’d never quite had a role like that. Nobody liked him, which was really fun. And he didn’t care at all, he was just completely focused on what he was doing.”

Damon played off of Murphy’s character particularly well — creating a relationship between Groves and Oppenheimer that, despite tension, facilitates both individuals’ lofty aspirations to get ahead. Despite the arm’s length distance between the duo, the pairing ultimately results in a friendship based on mutual respect.

“They both appreciated each other — they helped each other fulfill each other’s ambitions,” Damon noted. “Each couldn’t have done it without the other. There was a lot of genuine affection there.”

Despite having vastly different backgrounds and personalities, both characters accomplish the unbelievable amid the constant push and pull between the military, which Groves represents, and the enterprising civilian so perfectly illustrated by Oppenheimer.

“[It’s] that tension between the military and the science community, just because the military is just completely obsessed with compartmentalization and secrecy,” Damon noted. “You’re talking about an existential threat to humankind, but the scientists are all about kind of keeping things open and learning from one another. They were philosophically totally opposed, and that led to this kind of natural tension between Groves and everybody else.”

Ultimately, in the film’s following of the development of the atomic bomb, Nolan, Damon noted, developed something more akin to a horror film or psychological thriller.

“I was terrified when I when I got to the last line of the script, and then seeing it in the film,” Damon said. “I’ve been kind of filled with dread.”

Artful anxiety is something that Damon attributes often to the genius of Nolan, who both wrote and directed the film.

“His movies do this really incredible thing where he’s always grappling with these big concepts, but they’re also very intimate,” Damon said. “He always wants to put interesting questions in front of his audience and let them ponder them, but at the same time, they’re not lectures or thought exercises. They’re very emotional movies and they’re very intimate and and so he’s always got these compelling characters.”

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead)

World War II ended with a literal bang when the U.S. military leveled the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with never-before-seen atomic devastation. And though the explosive events of Aug. 6 and 9, 1945 live on as an ominous warning of the power of nuclear weapons, the series of events preceding those days have been relatively glossed over in the world of modern cinema — until now.

Christopher Nolan’s (”Dark Knight,” “Dunkirk”) “Oppenheimer” is a war epic, a revelation, and a cinematic masterpiece, but above all, it is a horror film. The sense of foreboding created while witnessing the best of humanity careen toward its own demise elicits a sense of dread more reminiscent of the best of the horror genre.

Loosely based on the biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Nolan’s story of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the father of the atomic bomb — is both beautiful and terrifying.

Played by Cillian Murphy at his absolute best, Oppenheimer offers a portrait of the individual struggle between balancing the pursuit of greatness and bringing humanity the closest it has ever been to its own destruction.

Nolan, at the top of his game for his second World War II film (following the triumphant “Dunkirk”), hurls movie-goers into Oppenheimer’s life in an almost schizophrenic manner, jumping through time and incorporating black-and-white sequences to illustrate the frenzied lead up to those fateful days in 1945.

As an individual, Oppenheimer explores the moral conflicts of religion, politics, and philosophy that weigh heavily on his involvement in the infamous Manhattan Project, a decision he makes with a blend of hubris and scientific curiosity.

In the grand scheme, Oppenheimer’s decision to build the bomb is one he believes to be for the good of mankind. Exhibiting to the world this kind of destructive power, he naively thinks, will mean the end of all wars. In reality, the new technology threw the world into an arms race during the ensuing Cold War, the traces of which are still seen today as countries around the globe attempt to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

While viewers might expect the bombing events on August 6 and 9 to be the height of the film, the real climax arrives as the team prepares to drop a test explosive south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. The event marks the culmination of years of work conducted by the world’s smartest minds. And as the device is lowered for detonation, the pent-up fear that preceded it is unleashed in a firework display of destruction.

As the countdown hits zero, there is a flash and silence. A mushroom cloud pillows into the night sky. The feeling of victory for the team is immediate, but for the audience, there is a feeling more akin to the climax of a horror film in which the lead character realizes death is imminent.

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer’s voice echoes over the aftershocks of the bomb. The quote from the Bhagavad Gita makes numerous appearances in the film, and though it’s a bit on the nose, it encapsulates what the physicist becomes in his quest for knowledge.

The sentiment that follows throughout the rest of the movie, to hearken back to Jurassic Park, is one of Manhattan Project personnel being so preoccupied with whether or not they could create an atomic bomb, that no one stops to consider whether they should.

The original impetus of nuclear development in the U.S. may have been to beat the Nazis to constructing the bomb, but once America’s nuclear program began — even with the Germans surrendering — there was no stopping it.

And Oppenheimer, once seen as an American patriot who brought about a heroic end to the war, must live with the realization that he may, in fact, be the greatest villain in human history.

“Oppenheimer” is in theaters July 21.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

After parting with Warner Bros. after nearly 20 years, Christopher Nolan is set to helm another historical drama, this time telling the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer — the “father of the atomic bomb.”

(You can watch the first trailer for the movie below!)

After a public fallout with Warner Bros. last year over its decision to release its entire 2021 catalogue concurrently on HBO Max, Nolan slammed HBO Max as “the worst streaming service,” and called the studio’s decision “a real bait and switch … [it’s] not how you treat filmmakers and stars and people who — these guys have given a lot for these projects. They deserved to be consulted and spoken to about what was going to happen to their work,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Deadline was first to report that Universal Pictures has landed the right to finance — with an operating budget of $100 million — and distribute Nolan’s latest film, which is slated to begin filming this spring.

While many critics deemed Nolan’s 2020 film “Tenet” a sci-fi clunker, the director has a strong track record of box office hits, including his 2014 film “Interstellar”, “The Dark Knight”, and his 2017 Oscar-winning film “Dunkirk”, which was about the pivotal evacuation of Allied forces in 1940 from mainland Europe.

Nolan’s upcoming film on Oppenheimer will once again move the director firmly into historical dramas, and there’s certainly no shortage of the latter.

the Manhattan Project

Beginning in 1942 under the code name the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer spearheaded the U.S. development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War.

At the time, Oppenheimer wrote that work on the bomb “consisted of numerous scattered experimental projects. Although I had no administrative experience and was not an experimental physicist, I felt sufficiently informed and challenged by the problem to be glad to accept.”

The theoretical questions that faced Oppenheimer and his team were staggering.

“Among other things,” writes historian Robert LaRue, “the Berkeley participants wanted to determine the yield of an atomic weapon. How much explosive force could be expected from the gadget they were contemplating? What might be its effects?”

Another concern? Igniting the atmosphere and possibly causing the end of the world.

‘I am become death’

While little has been released about the nature of the film, it presumably will focus on Oppenheimer’s work within the Berkeley group and his role in the Trinity Test in New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated.

Upon seeing the success of the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer knew the world would not be the same — famously quoting the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

“I suppose we all thought that one way or another,” Oppenheimer later recalled.

On Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped Oppenheimer’s bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, killing more than 100,000 people and precipitating the Empire of Japan’s surrender.

Oppenheimer’s words were prescient. He had indeed created a weapon that would forever change the course of human history.

Nolan wrote the script about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, and while casting has yet to take place, Cillian Murphy — a frequent cast member in Nolan’s films — is rumored as a possible member of the ensemble. 

The ‘Oppenheimer’ trailer

The first trailer for “Oppenheimer” was released July 28, 2022. Watch it below:

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Scientist Matthew Maury modernized navigation techniques but his racist politics have made him a pariah

In October 1862 world-renowned scientist and former U.S. Navy officer Matthew Maury, sextant in hand, lay on the deck of a blockade runner departing Charleston, South Carolina, for England. After resigning his commission to join the Confederacy, Maury had sparred with its leaders over defending the Confederate coastline. Finding him a thorn in their sides, they had dispatched him to England, ostensibly to shop for ships. The blockade runner’s captain had lost his way, and Maury offered to chart a course by the stars. Maury, 55, had not been to sea for more than two decades but in no time, he was announcing a new course that would have the vessel to Bermuda by 2 a.m. That hour came and went, but within 10 minutes, there was the Bermuda shore, confirming Maury’s expertise at maritime navigation. Over his career, he systematized the old, amorphous method of crowd-sourcing logbook entries on winds, rain, currents, even whale migrations to deliver routes that cut some voyages by 30 days. That success opened the door for another effort Maury championed: the National Weather Service. Along the way, he devised underwater mines and torpedoes and helped gauge the feasibility of laying transatlantic telegraph cable on the seafloor. 

No figure in the Confederacy was more colorful, accomplished, and committed to White supremacy than Matthew Fontaine Maury. Born into a family descended from Huguenots arriving in Virginia in the early 1700s, Maury spent much of his youth in Franklin, Tennessee, where his slave-holding parents ran a not-very-successful farm. Seventh of nine children, Maury set his sights on the Navy, as his eldest brother had. Over his father’s objections, in 1825 he became a midshipman. He spent nine years at sea, visiting locales ranging from Brazil to the Marquesas Islands and teaching himself navigation, Spanish, and spherical geometry. In 1839, that career came to a grinding halt. A carriage accident in Virginia crushed his right leg, disqualifying him for shipboard duty.

Over the next few years, Maury remained a lieutenant at half pay. He established himself as a writer, penning sometimes anonymous and often scathing newspaper pieces about corruption in the Navy. His criticisms caught enough official attention that when his identity became known, he was appointed in 1842 to head the navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments, a Washington, DC-based entity that doubled as the U.S. Naval Observatory. Rivals felt Lt. Maury did not deserve the position, lacking as he did training in astronomy, but he made up for that shortfall with other skills, creating a persona as a man of science for public benefit. Maury dove in, spending nights working at the observatory, located on a marshy stretch of Georgetown so riddled with mosquitoes that he and his coworkers regularly endured bouts of what would now be recognized as malaria. He also pushed to establish the U.S. Naval Academy.

In 1853, at Maury’s prodding, ten naval powers assembled in Belgium for a conference that ended with an agreement that all parties would collect oceangoing data and share their results with the U.S. Naval Observatory in exchange for receiving U.S. ocean charts. The United States would issue blank logbooks for recording the data, along with bottles that were empty but for blank logs corked inside to be tossed overboard and meant to be retrieved by passing vessels and recorded as floating markers. According to John Grady’s in-depth biography of Maury, conference host Leopold I of Belgium hailed the use of a ship as a “floating observatory, a temple of science.” By the late 1850s, more than 137,000 vessels were gathering wind, rain, and current information. The data dramatically shortened some commercial routes, saving millions in shipping costs. To help captains avoid collisions at sea, Maury proposed dedicated transatlantic sea lanes for traveling east and west.

In 1856, Maury was among Navy officers summarily retired, perhaps thanks to rivals like Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution and Senator Stephen Mallory (D-Florida), who chaired a committee on naval affairs. Maury fought to retain his commission—and succeeded. He had devoted his life to the U.S. Navy, but as the national rupture over slavery widened, he wrote, “The real question at issue is a sectional one; and with the South, it is a question of empire. Increase, multiply, and replenish the earth…” As many Southerners did, Maury envisioned America’s slaveholding empire expanding not only into the American West but also into Cuba and Brazil. 

When Virginia seceded in April 1861, Maury submitted his resignation and offered his services to the Confederacy. Among its leaders was his foe Mallory. Maury tinkered experimentally with electrically detonated torpedoes, and Confederate ships deploying his inventions sank some 55 Union ships blockading Confederate ports. In 1862, he sailed to England to trade on his celebrity and secure ships for the Confederacy if he was able. Maury procured a couple of vessels and continued devising explosives.

In November 1865, the last Confederate troops surrendered. Now a man without a country, Maury approached Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian in Mexico, peddling a campaign to recruit former Confederates and freed Blacks to establish a slaveholding settlement. His scheme foundered. In June 1867 the Mexican opposition executed Maximilian, by which time Maury had found his way to England. In 1870, with ire against ex-Confederates ebbing, he returned to the United States and went to work at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, home of the institution that became  Washington and Lee University, presided over by Robert E. Lee until his death in 1870. Maury drew the job of surveying Virginia resources to rebuild the devastated state. But he did not live much longer, dying in 1873. 

Until then, Maury promoted broad collection of weather data—an inventory of patterns and forecasts as useful to farmers as maritime data had been to shippers. Formal collection and distribution of weather reports by telegraph began around 1870. Like the National Weather Service, Maury’s books, including his 1855 The Physical Geography of the Sea, survived him. A memorable passage likened the earth’s surface to the bed of an invisible ocean of atmosphere. (Jules Verne reportedly consulted the book.) Maury wove his Christian beliefs into his observations, creating a religio-mystical tone that irritated some who questioned his scientific bona fides. Yet his insights remain trenchant—”it is the girdling encircling air that makes the whole world kin”—and vivid: “…without atmosphere,” he wrote, “the bald earth, as it revolved on its axis, would turn its tanned and weakened front to the full and unmitigated rays of the lord of the day.” 

For promoters of the Lost Cause—the ideology that imagined a valiant, chivalric South pulverized by its industrial foe’s superior resources and troop numbers—Maury was an attractive hero, esteemed worldwide yet also an unrepentant White supremacist. His name peppers roads and schools, including Maury Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Wealthy preservationist Elvira Worth Moffitt led a long campaign to erect a Maury memorial on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. “Pathfinder,” dedicated in 1929 on Armistice Day—a nod toward reconciliation—portrayed Maury as a thoughtful navigator. Maury’s unrelenting fealty to expanding slaveholding into what he called the “American Mediterranean” has come to tarnish his scientific legacy. In the summer of 2020, when Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the removal of Confederate monuments and symbols from perches throughout the city, “Pathfinder” was among them.

This story was featured in the August 2021 issue of American History Magazine. To subscribe, click here.

The two 14-by-20-foot experimental shacks—built under the direction of U.S. Army Major Walter Reed, MD—sat 80 yards apart on a wide, grassy plain at Camp Lazear, near the town of Quemados, Cuba. Clusters of white canvas wall tents stood on either side at a respectful distance, like hospital visitors reluctant to approach the deathly ill.

From the outside, the shacks seemed ordinary. Their specially designed interiors, however, were anything but. Both were tightly sealed and fitted with screened double doors; visitors had to pass through tiny vestibules to reach the inner chambers. Building No. 1, heated to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, housed three beds, and, according to Reed, “three large boxes filled with sheets, pillowslips, blankets, etc., contaminated by contact” with diseased individuals. 

But it was in Building No. 2, divided in two by a fine-mesh wire screen, that medical history was made on December 5, 1900. That day, at 2:30 p.m., Private John R. Kissinger entered one side, reclined on the only bed, and allowed himself to be bitten repeatedly by five hungry mosquitoes, each infected with the dreaded yellow fever.

The last two decades of the 1800s witnessed an astonishing succession of medical discoveries. In 1881, Brigadier General George Miller Sternberg, a physician with the U.S. Army, successfully isolated the bacterium responsible for pneumonia, and the same year Louis Pasteur, a French microbiologist and chemist, produced a vaccine that prevented anthrax. Antitoxins were discovered in 1890, and in 1892 Theobald Smith, an epidemiologist and pathologist who served as the inspector of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Industry, first established that ticks spread Texas cattle fever.

But perhaps the most significant advance was made in the century’s final month by Reed, one of the greatest medical research scientists the world has ever known. It was the first momentous step in the eradication of yellow fever, a pestilence that had, over the previous century, taken the lives of 100,000 Americans. Imported to the United States from the tropics, yellow fever had ravaged port cities like New Orleans and Philadelphia—frequently killing 40 percent, or more, of those infected.

Walter Reed was born on September 13, 1851, in Belroi, Virginia, the son of a circuit-riding Methodist minister. While still young, he began displaying some of the traits for which he was later admired: self-control, a high sense of honor, and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Reed’s early schooling was rather sporadic, but in 1866 the family moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he would study at the Charlottesville Institute, a one-building academy that prepared him for his next educational experience.

In 1867, at age 16, Reed matriculated at the nearby University of Virginia. Special dispensation was required because of his youth. That year, according to one of his professors, Reed studied Latin, Greek, and English literature, among other subjects.

Reed wanted to stay the entire course at Mr. Jefferson’s university, but because two of his brothers were already enrolled there and his family’s resources were limited, he decided after his first year to ask the faculty to grant him a bachelor’s degree in the subjects he had already studied. Because he was so young, however, his request was refused.

Reed next inquired, in person at a faculty meeting, if he could be granted the degree of doctor of medicine—then requiring a two-year course of study—if he was able to pass the necessary examinations the following year. Thinking this an absolute impossibility, several of the professors agreed.

“Doctor,” Reed reportedly said to 60-year-old Socrates Maupin, a chemistry professor and chairman of the faculty, “you have heard these gentlemen. Will you see that I have my degree as MD if I make the required standard?” When Maupin answered that he would, Reed bowed to the other faculty members, gamely saying, “Gentlemen, I hold you to your promise,” and then walked out of the chamber.

Reed threw himself into his studies, which included courses in chemistry; medicine, which featured legal medicine and obstetrics; physiology and surgery; anatomy; and materia medica (pharmacy). As he handed Reed his diploma nine months later, in the summer of 1869, Maupin noted that the 17-year-old student was the youngest ever to graduate from the University of Virginia Medical School.

From Charlottesville, Reed traveled to New York City, where he earned a second doctor of medicine degree, at Bellevue Hospital Medical College, in 1870. Over the next five years he served his internship at various medical institutions in the city. Additionally, in 1873—at age 22—Reed was appointed one of the five inspectors on the Brooklyn Board of Health.

In 1874 Reed met his future wife, Emilie Lawrence, and made a career choice that eventually led to his world-­changing research and the virtual eradication of yellow fever: He decided to enter the U.S. Army Medical Corps. With his typical determination, Reed resumed his studies and in February 1875 passed the grueling 30-hour examination to enter the medical corps. The following year, Reed and Lawrence married, and Reed was commissioned assistant surgeon with the rank of first lieutenant.

Reed’s illustrious army career began with years of monotonous garrison duty. In Arizona he served at Fort Lowell and Camp Apache. At these frontier posts, Reed was responsible not only for the health of the military detachment and its many dependents but also for that of the nearby Native American tribes. It was there that he first experienced the outbreak of an epidemic—smallpox in this case—and its accompanying suffering and death. In 1890, after further postings in Nebraska and Alabama, Reed was ordered to Fort McHenry in Baltimore, with the title of attending surgeon and examiner of recruits. In Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins, the first research university in the United States, Reed returned to the classroom, studying pathology and the emerging science of bacteriology in a laboratory course taught by William Henry Welch, the nation’s foremost pathologist. (Welch, who had studied under Louis Pasteur, was one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital and the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. During his lifetime, he became known as “the dean of American medicine.”) 

The understanding of infectious diseases had improved markedly over the preceding 10 years. On the basis of Pasteur’s early work on germ theory, and new methods for the cultivation and study of bacteria, “there had followed in rapid succession,” Welch wrote, “such important discoveries as those of the specific germs causing anthrax, tuberculosis, leprosy, glanders,…tetanus, pneumonia, typhoid fever, malaria, amoebic dysentery, cerebro-spinal meningitis, diphtheria, and a large number of animal diseases.”

In 1893, after another tour of duty out west, Reed was ordered to report to the Washington, D.C., office of U.S. Surgeon General George Sternberg, a noted bacteriologist. Reed was appointed curator of the Army Medical Museum (which later became the National Museum of Health and Medicine) and was made professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy at the newly organized Army Medical School in Washington. Reed also joined the faculty of the Columbian University Medical School (later the George Washington University School of Medicine).

While performing these new assignments, Reed collaborated closely with Sternberg on a smallpox vaccine study and in 1895 observed an outbreak of malaria near the nation’s capital. The following year, Reed distinguished himself as a medical researcher when yellow fever broke out among U.S. Army personnel—enlisted men, but mysteriously, not their officers—stationed along the Potomac River. Popular belief held that the soldiers had contracted the illness by drinking river water. Reed proved to local officials that the filthy Potomac was not the cause of the outbreak. Instead, he showed them that yellow fever was somehow connected to the marshy woods that lined the river: The soldiers who had gotten sick were accustomed to hiking through them at night, while their officers remained in camp.

In April 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. In Cuba, revolts against Spanish rule had been roiling the island for 30 years. By the late 1890s, partly because of reports that concentration camps were being used to control the Cuban people, public opinion in the United States favored Cuban rebellion and independence. When the armored cruiser USS Maine exploded and sank in the harbor at Havana, Cuba, on February 15, 1898, with the loss of 260 sailors, American newspapers blamed Spain. On April 20, President William McKinley signed a joint congressional resolution demanding that Spain withdraw from the island and authorizing U.S. military intervention to aid the rebels. Spain, however, refused to leave Cuba. It declared war on the United States on April 24, and a day later the United States declared war on Spain. The 10-week conflict in the Caribbean and the Pacific—during which U.S. naval power proved decisive—led to Cuban independence, and the Spanish cession of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States for $20 million.

Although the war was short and relatively bloodless—only 332 Americans died in combat—the camps of the U.S. volunteer units, both in Cuba and at home, were notoriously disease ridden. Almost 3,000 soldiers succumbed to the various illnesses that had swept through the encampments like the reaper’s scythe. Yellow fever and typhoid fever had been far deadlier than Spanish bullets.

After the fighting ended in August, Sternberg made Reed the head of a board of officers charged with investigating the spread of typhoid fever in the stateside camps. Along with Majors Edward O. Shakespeare and Victor C. Vaughan, both of whom had studied U.S. typhoid outbreaks, Reed visited training camps in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia. By examining each camp’s water supply, waste removal, and food preparation and distribution—and tracing the disease’s transmission—they showed that typhoid is both infectious and contagious. It seeped into the water and then spread among the soldiers because of poor hygiene. Infected bedding, left behind by departing soldiers, for example, quickly infected arriving soldiers who used it. Flies, too, carried the disease through the camps. 

In a massive two-volume report, Reed’s “Typhoid Board” thus showed that the disease was spread by flies, as well as by humans, drinking water, and objects contaminated by fecal bacilli. The 46-year-old major now stood on the brink of his greatest service to medicine and mankind.

In May 1900, Reed was ordered to Havana and put in charge of the newly created Yellow Fever Commission. His team was composed of U.S. Army acting assistant surgeons. English-­born James Carroll, who had a medical degree from the University of Maryland, was in charge of bacteriology. Jesse Lazear, a bacteriologist who had graduated from the medical school at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, performed the laboratory work and soon also took over the handling of the experimental mosquitoes. Cuban-American Aristides Agramonte y Simoni, a specialist in tropical medicine who also had a medical degree from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, conducted the pathological work.

The “yellow plague,” as it was also called, had stricken many of the U.S. soldiers stationed in Cuba both during and after the war. While on the island, according to Reed, the army suffered 1,575 cases of yellow fever, causing 231 deaths. Over the years, the dreaded “Yellow Jack” had also been no stranger to cities in the United States. Reed estimated that from 1793 to 1900, the nation had been afflicted with 95 yellow fever epidemics. During that period 500,000 Americans had been infected, and 100,000 of them had died. New Orleans had been “the greatest sufferer,” Reed noted, with 41,348 deaths, followed by Philadelphia, with 10,038. Memphis, Tennessee, lost nearly 8,000 residents to four yellow fever epidemics in the 1850s and 1870s. “There were hours, especially at night,” a survivor of the city’s 1878 outbreak wrote, “when the solemn oppression of universal death bore upon the human mind, as if the day of judgment was about to dawn.”

A headache and sudden chills typically mark the onset of this viral scourge, followed by severe body pains, vomiting, and a high fever that may last for weeks. Kidney failure and liver disorder—which causes a sickly jaundice, after which the disease is named—are also common. Often these indications subside, a possible signal of recovery, but usually they return with full force, bringing with them internal bleeding and the horrible black vomit that results when stomachs filled with blood are voided.

Arriving at Columbia Barracks near Quemados, Cuba, in June 1900, Reed and his fellow researchers first set out to prove the theory proposed by Giuseppe Sanarelli, an Italian bacteriologist, that Bacillus icteroides, a bacterium of the hog-cholera group, was responsible for yellow fever. When they found no causal relationship, however, they decided to set aside the search for the specific agent and concentrate on how it was propagated. 

Consequently, they turned to the hypothesis of Carlos J. Finlay, a physician in Havana who had graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. For 19 years, Finlay had argued that yellow fever was carried by the common house mosquito. “When the mosquito becomes contaminated,” he had written in 1881, “not only its eggs but also its salivary and venom glands may be invaded by the pathogenous germs, so that the latter may be discharged…when the insect attacks its next victim.” Because he was so far ahead of his time and because his hypothesis hadn’t been proved under laboratory conditions, the medical community spurned his work, laughingly referring to him as “the mosquito man”—the crazy Cuban who claimed that insects could carry yellow fever.

Reed’s team decided to test Finlay’s proposition with a bold experimental method: They would use human beings. “After careful consideration,” wrote Howard Atwood Kelly, another of the founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital, “the Commission reached the conclusion that the results, if positive, would be sufficient service to humanity to justify the procedure, provided, of course, that each individual…was fully informed of the risks he ran, and gave his free consent.” Two dozen men—soldiers at nearby Columbia Barracks and a few Spanish immigrants—bravely volunteered for this potentially fatal experiment. 

The members of the commission, however, agreed that it was their duty to be subjected first.

With some tiny black mosquito eggs that Finlay provided, several insects were “reared in the laboratory,” according to Carroll, and “caused to feed upon four cases of yellow fever, two of them severe.” Carroll and Lazear courageously volunteered to be bitten by the infected mosquitoes, and both men promptly came down with the disease. “Thus it happened that I was the first person to whom the mosquito was proved to convey the disease,” Carroll later wrote. “Dr. Lazear was stricken and died in convulsions just one week later, after several days of delirium with black vomit.”

Saddened by the loss of one of his doctors, Reed was nonetheless proud to report the team’s finding to the Public Health Association at its meeting in Indianapolis on October 23, 1900. “The mosquito,” Reed told the gathering, “acts as the intermediate host for the parasite of yellow fever.”

To prove this definitively to the world, as well as to debunk the theory that the disease was transmitted via soiled clothing, required more experiments—tests performed under strict laboratory control. “It became evident that if further experiments were to be of permanent value to humanity,” Kelly wrote, “some means must be provided by which perfect control could be exercised over the movements of the individuals subjected to experiment for some time prior to inoculation, in order to exclude every possible source of infection except the mosquito.”

On November 20, 1900, Camp Lazear, a tightly quarantined experimental station named in honor of the valiant doctor, was established one mile from Quemados, and the two experimental shacks were constructed. In Building No. 1—known as the “Infected Clothing Building”—three volunteers spent 20 consecutive nights wrapped in befouled bedclothing. In Building No. 2—the “Infected Mosquito Building”—Private Kissinger allowed himself to be bitten repeatedly by infected mosquitoes. Within days he developed what is considered to be the first case of controlled experimental yellow fever. (Kissinger recovered and returned home to Indiana, only to suffer a 13-year paralysis of his legs—a side effect of his bout with yellow fever. Congress granted him a pension of $125 a month, supporters purchased him a home, and in 1929 he was awarded the Medal of Honor. Kissinger died in 1946.)

In the following weeks, in like manner, 20 more cases of the terrifying illness were produced. These results confirmed Finlay’s previously denounced theory. None of the volunteers who slept in the Infected Clothing Building contracted yellow fever. Exposure to contaminated fabrics posed no danger at all—a surprising conclusion because it ran contrary to longstanding popular belief. These findings, according to historian Philip Alexander Bruce, were “an epochal discovery in the history of preventive medicine.”

“It is with a great deal of pleasure that I hasten to tell you that we have succeeded in producing a case of unmistakable yellow fever by the bite of the mosquito,” Reed wrote in a letter to his wife. “Rejoice with me, sweetheart, as, aside from the antitoxin of diphtheria and [Robert] Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus [the bacterium that causes tuberculosis], it will be regarded as the most important piece of work, scientifically, during the 19th century.”

Reed’s discovery would, in time, open “a new chapter in the history of vast regions of the tropics,” as Bruce put it. By controlling the mosquitoes’ breeding places, yellow fever was subsequently swept from the island of Cuba. In like manner, the Panama Canal Zone was later freed from the ravages of the death-dealing insect. 

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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For his work, Reed was enthusiastically acclaimed throughout the scientific world. He now became the peer of Crawford Long, who had discovered anesthetics; Joseph Lister, who had first used antiseptics; and Edward Jenner, “the father of immunology,” the man who had pioneered the concept of vaccination.

In February 1901, Reed came back to Washington and returned to the classroom. He taught pathology and bacteriology at the Army Medical School as well as at the Columbian University Medical School. “He was a favorite with his students,” wrote biographer Ralph Nading Hill, “for he conveyed an enthusiasm for his subject that is the mark of great teachers.”

In the summer of 1902, Reed was awarded two honorary degrees: a doctor of law from the University of Michigan and a master of arts from Harvard University. The following November, Reed was made librarian of the surgeon general’s library. “Mental exertion, however,” wrote biographer L. N. Wood, “was becoming strangely painful to the alert mind that had always before approached it so buoyantly.” He continued to push himself, until finally, un­able to conceal his waning strength from his wife, he consulted his doctor. It was already too late. On November 13 physicians diagnosed appendicitis. He underwent an appendectomy, but peritonitis had already set in. Reed died on November 23, 1902, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He was only 51 years old.

After incorporating the mosquito-elimination measures recommended by Walter Reed’s Yellow Fever Commission, New Orleans—the American city that had lost the most citizens to Yellow Jack—suffered through only one more such epidemic in 1905. It was the last outbreak of yellow fever in the United States. 

Named in his honor, Walter Reed General Hospital—founded in 1909 on 113 acres in the District of Columbia—was the U.S. Army’s premier medical facility for more than 100 years. During its time on the front line of medical service, it treated more than 150,000 active and retired military personnel. Its successor, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, operated from 1977 to 2011, when the Army dedicated Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, a massive hospital complex, on the grounds of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

“When his great work was accomplished,” Mrs. Reed wrote after her husband’s death, “the happiness which filled his soul was entirely for the suffering he would spare humanity. He rejoiced that he had not lived in vain, and that God had seen fit to make him an instrument of good.” MHQ

Rick Britton, a historian and cartographer, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

On October 28, 1956, Elvis Presley appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show”, hips a-swayin’, as he sang to a near-hysterical audience. But it turns out, Elvis Presley was more than just a “Hound Dog”, as historian David M. Perry demonstrates.

Elvis’s performance in itself was memorable, but his appearance also helped to save lives. A year prior, the Salk Vaccine Field Trials had proven to be 80 to 90 percent effective against the polio virus—a virus that struck seemingly without warning, leaving children, mostly young boys, with varying degrees of paralysis and in some circumstances, death.

In 1951 alone, there were 58,000 new recorded cases of polio, with more than 3,000 Americans dying from the disease.

Yet, despite Salk’s medical breakthrough, many Americans were still wary of the vaccine.

To help combat this, Presley readily agreed to receive the polio vaccine on live television. And indeed, after viewers watched the “King of Rock and Roll” happily become inoculated, there was a significant spike in immunizations across the country.

“It made headlines and, critically, also helped convince teens and young adults—people who thought they weren’t at risk—that they needed a vaccine too in order to help defeat the deadly disease,” Perry writes.

By 1957 new polio cases had dropped to under 6,000 in the U.S. And, according to the CDC, since 1979 no cases polio have originated from the U.S.

Salk is credited with saving the lives of millions by providing all Americans with relatively cheap and widespread access to his vaccine. But perhaps it was Presley’s “cool factor” that saved many originally wary or indifferent civilians.

Salk himself lost out on an estimated seven billion dollars in revenue by never patenting the vaccine. A fact that seemingly never bothered the scientist.

“Could you patent the sun?” he famously declared.

“Polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media, not even at its height in the 1940s and 1950s,” David M. Oshinsky writes in Polio: An American Story. Yet at the turn of the 20th century, the public fear of polio reached a fever pitch.

The virus struck seemingly without warning, leaving children, mostly young boys, with varying degrees of paralysis and in some circumstances, death.

The first recordings of poliomyelitis, shortened to “polio” by American journalists who balked at using the 13-letter word, was in Egypt in 1500 BC. However, when polio did strike, for almost everyone the result was usually a mild infection followed by a lifetime of immunity, according to Oshinsky. In later years, little attention was given to it in the press.

Indeed, the first recorded polio epidemic in the United States, which occurred in Otter Valley, Vermont in 1894, would have gone largely unnoticed without the tireless efforts of Charles Caverly, a young country doctor. Tracking down the 123 struck by the virus, Caverly found that 84 cases were under the age of 6, 50 were permanently paralyzed from polio, and 18 died. Most notably, Caverly found that a majority of the victims were male.

By the 1930s, polio had received significant attention from both the press and the medical community. In 1938, with the backing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at the age of 39, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was founded. Within that foundation — later renamed the March of Dimes — a fierce competition to develop a vaccine emerged between three people: Albert Sabin, Jonas Salk, and Hilary Koprowski.

Sabin and Koprowski backed the live-virus vaccine, which is designed to create a natural, weak infection that would trigger the body to generate antibodies. But unlike his peers, Salk favored a dead-virus version “intended to stimulate the immune system to produce the desired antibodies without creating a natural infection,” writes Oshinsky. While most polio researchers backed Sabin and Koprowski’s approach, the foundation privately deemed that Salk’s method might be quicker and more marketable. Salk had the edge.

In 1951, Salk and his team had successfully developed a method that cultivated the poliovirus in the kidney tissue of monkeys, giving Salk the ability to produce large quantities of the virus. The following year, he rapidly began conducting the first human trials on children at two Pittsburgh institutions for the physically and intellectually disabled. Salk even went as far as injecting his own wife and three sons with his vaccine. Time was of the essence, as that year alone saw 58,000 new cases of polio, with more than 3,000 Americans dying from the disease.

By March 1953, Salk was ready to announce that he had successfully created a polio vaccine. Salk insisted that “progress has been more rapid than we had any right to expect” but cautioned the public that “no vaccine [was] available for widespread use for the next polio season,” Despite this, the radio announcement was met with widespread jubilation, and the scientist became an instant hero to the American public.

The Vaccine Advisory Committee approved a field test of Salk’s polio vaccine, which commenced the largest medical experiment in American history. The so-called Salk Vaccine Field Trials of 1954 involved almost two million elementary school children, writes Oshinsky. Elvis Presley even volunteered to be vaccinated on live television to encourage others to take the vaccine.

After a year, at a news conference at the University of Michigan, the results of the trial were announced. They vaccine, they said, was 80 to 90 percent effective against the polio virus. That same day, the U.S. government licensed Salk’s vaccine for widespread distribution.

The vaccine did not come without cost, however. Just weeks after the landmark conference, 11 children who were recently vaccinated died and hundreds of others were left paralyzed.

The defective vaccine was traced back to Cutter Laboratories in California, and although unproven, it “is likely that certain production methods (which, it turns out, did not follow Salk’s instructions) resulted in a failure to completely kill the Type 1 (Mahoney) poliovirus in the vaccine,” according to the Historyofvaccines.org.

Others within the scientific community argued that Salk’s vaccine was unsafe and ineffective. Among the loudest of the voices was Sabin, Salk’s fiercest rival.

Yet despite the Cutter incident and initial delays in production, by 1957 new polio cases had dropped to under 6,000 in the U.S. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no cases of polio have originated in the U.S. since 1979.

For his work, Salk was awarded the two highest civilian honors: the Congressional Gold Medal in 1955 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Salk, however, was notably denied admission to the National Academy of Sciences, with his longtime rival Sabin sneering, “You could go into the kitchen and do what he did.”

Salk is credited with saving the lives of millions and providing all Americans with relatively cheap and widespread access to his vaccine. The scientist never patented his polio vaccine and lost out on billions of dollars in revenue.

In later years, when asked by journalist Edward R. Murrow why he never sought a patent, Salk responded, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”