Walter Reed: Yellow Fever and Murfreesboro

Murfreesboro has a quiet claim on one of American medicine's greatest stories. Walter Reed, later the Army surgeon who proved that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes, lived here as a young man and married Emily Lawrence of this town. Born in Virginia in eighteen fifty-one, Reed joined the Army Medical Corps and spent decades in frontier postings before receiving his most consequential assignment in nineteen hundred: lead the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba.

Through a careful series of controlled experiments, Reed and his team demonstrated that the female Aedes aegypti mosquito was the carrier. Within months of implementing mosquito-control measures in Havana, the city was largely freed from yellow fever. Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington was named in his honor.

His North Carolina chapter was brief, but Murfreesboro can claim the man who changed public health forever.