Walter Reed

Walter Reed

Walter Reed was born in Belroi, Virginia, to Lemuel Sutton Reed and his first wife, Pharaba White. Reed was the youngest-ever recipient of an M. D. from the University of Virginia. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1876 to 1883. He later became a physician at George Washington Hospital.

About Walter Reed in brief

Summary Walter ReedWalter Reed was born in Belroi, Virginia, to Lemuel Sutton Reed and his first wife, Pharaba White. Reed was the youngest-ever recipient of an M. D. from the University of Virginia. He married Emily Blackwell Lawrence of North Carolina on April 26, 1876 and took her West with him. While posted at frontier camps, the couple also adopted a Native American girl named Susie. In 1893, Reed joined the faculty of the George Washington University School of Medicine. He held the professorship of Bacteriology and Clinical Microscopy. In 1896, Reed first distinguished himself as a medical investigator. He proved that yellow fever among enlisted men stationed near Potomac River was not a result of drinking the river water. Reed also proved that the outbreak of typhoid fever in Cuba had no relation to the incidence of yellow fever in U. S. Army encampments there during the Spanish–American War. In 1898, Reed was appointed chairman of a panel formed to investigate an epidemic of Yellow fever. Reed and his colleagues showed that fecal matter and food contaminated by flies became a source of the disease.

Reed traveled to Cuba to study diseases in Spanish-American encampments during the War. He died in Washington, D. C. in 1901. He is buried in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington D.C., where he was a professor of bacteriology and clinical microscopy. He was married to Mary C. Byrd Kyle, with whom he would have a daughter, Emily Lawrence Reed, until his death in 1913. He also had a son, Walter Lawrence Reed, who died in a car accident in 1968. He had a daughter with his second wife, Mary C., who died of lung cancer in 1989. He has a daughter named Emily Lawrence, who died on December 17, 2011. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1876 to 1883. He retired from the Army in 1914. He later became a physician at George Washington Hospital in Washington. Reed’s son, Emily, was the first woman to receive a doctor’s degree from a major medical school in the United States. Reed died in 1998. He wrote a book about his experiences in the American West, “The American West: A Biography of the American Frontier”