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1495 - 1889 | 1898 - 2003
1898 |
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1900 |
May 23: George Sternberg, surgeon general of the U.S. Army, recommends that a board be established for scientific study of infectious diseases, particularly yellow fever, in Cuba. Sternberg will choose Major Walter Reed, a physician in the U.S. Army, to lead the board known as the United States Army Yellow Fever Board. May 24: Four doctors are named to serve on the board that will study yellow fever: Walter Reed, James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte and Jesse Lazear.
August: The board begins testing Finlay's theory, allowing mosquitoes to feed on volunteers. For the first nine subjects, the results are negative.
October 23: Walter Reed presents a "Preliminary Note" about the board's findings to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Indianapolis. November 20: Camp Lazear, named in tribute to the sacrifice of Jesse Lazear, is established. The Yellow Fever Board pays volunteers to expose themselves to mosquito bites in order to show that the insect transmits the disease. Fourteen volunteers contract the disease; all recover. |
1901 |
February 16: Walter Reed publishes a paper on the board's work in the Journal of the American Medical Association. An accompanying editorial agrees that the results of the board's experiments prove the mosquito theory of transmission. Following Army efforts to eliminate breeding grounds for mosquitoes in Havana, no cases of yellow fever appear in the city from September 1901 to July 1902. |
1902 |
November 23: After his appendix ruptures, Walter Reed develops peritonitis and dies. |
1904 |
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1905 |
Yellow fever again strikes New Orleans, causing more than 900 deaths in the state of Louisiana. Mosquito mitigation efforts control the disease, marking the final epidemic in the United States. |
1909 |
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1929 |
Congress awards a special gold medal to surviving volunteers from Camp Lazear and members of the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Board or their next of kin. |
1931 |
Yellow Fever: An Epidemiological and Historical Study of its Place of Origin, written by former Assistant Surgeon General Henry Rose Carter, is published after his death in 1925. |
1936 |
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1942 |
Max Theiler develops a safer serum-free vaccine for yellow fever which replaces the earlier vaccine. |
1951 |
September: The Army medical complex in Washington, D.C. is renamed the Walter Reed Army Medical Center on the 100th anniversary of his birth. October 13: Max Theiler is selected to receive a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In his work at the Rockefeller Foundation, he developed a safe, standardized vaccine for yellow fever. He had also identified the virus that served as the basis of the French yellow fever vaccine and pioneered the use of laboratory mice to study the disease. |
1966 |
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1996 |
The Walter Reed Society, established to preserve Reed's legacy, is founded. |
2002 |
March: A Texas man, who had recently returned from a fishing trip in Brazil, dies from yellow fever, the third victim of the disease in the United States since 1996. Previously, no one in the United States had died from the disease for seven decades. |
2003 |
January: The World Health Organization reports new cases of yellow fever in West Africa and the Sudan that caused at least sixty deaths. |
1495 - 1889 | 1898 - 2003
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February 13: An explosion destroys the USS Maine while anchored in Havana, killing 268 U.S. sailors and Marines. The incident leads to the 
July: The board begins studying the disease, taking blood cultures from yellow fever victims before and after their deaths. Board members visit Carlos Finlay at his home in old Havana, hearing his theory that female mosquitoes transmit the disease.
August 27: Board member James Carroll, who hadn't believed that mosquitoes transmitted the disease, volunteers to be exposed to a mosquito that had fed on an active case of yellow fever twelve days before. Carroll contracts the disease. He becomes seriously ill but recovers.
September 25: Jesse Lazear, likely bitten by a mosquito used in his experiments, dies of yellow fever.
April: Major William Crawford Gorgas, who served as sanitation chief in Cuba during the U.S. occupation, is assigned to the 
May 1: The Walter Reed Army General Hospital opens in Washington, D.C.
November: A yellow fever vaccine, developed by researchers, including Max Theiler, at the Rockefeller Foundation Yellow Fever Laboratory in New York City, is first tested and put into production. As the threat of a world war appears, production is accelerated. The human serum in the vaccine causes an increased incidence of hepatitis.
November 21: President