Departures of note

In September 1900, Jesse William Lazear, a 34-year-old Army physician serving on the Yellow Fever Board in Cuba, deliberately allowed an infected mosquito to bite him to test whether the insect transmitted the disease. He had written to his wife on September 8, “I rather think I am on the track of the real germ,” and he contracted yellow fever seventeen days later, dying on September 25, 1900. At the time, the deliberate nature of his act was concealed—possibly because of family insurance policies—and the story circulated that he had accidentally mistaken the mosquito for an uninfected one of a different species. The truth emerged only in 1947, when Philip S. Hench discovered Lazear’s own notebook.

Lazear was born in Baltimore in 1866, the son of William and Charlotte Pettigrew. He attended Trinity Hall Military Academy and Washington & Jefferson College, earned a Bachelor of Arts from Johns Hopkins University in 1889, and received his M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1892. After specializing at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, he worked as a physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1895, studying malaria and yellow fever. In 1900 he reported for duty as assistant surgeon at Columbia Barracks in Quemados, Cuba.

On the Yellow Fever Board, Lazear worked alongside Walter Reed, James Carroll, and Aristides Agramonte. He was the only member with experience handling mosquitoes, and he used larvae from Carlos Finlay’s laboratory to confirm Finlay’s 1881 hypothesis that mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever. His death at age 34 made him the only commission member to die from the disease he was investigating. In his honor, a dormitory at Johns Hopkins University and a former chemistry building at Washington & Jefferson College were named after him, and a stained glass window in the War Memorial Chapel at the Washington National Cathedral depicts him with an injection needle and a mosquito.