Walter Reed's contribution to medical science has been called the most important ever made in this country, with the exception of the discovery of anesthesia. From the time of his astonishingly youthful graduation, at seventeen, from the medical school of the University of Virginia to his premature death at the height of his career, Walter Reed's single, driving impulse was to relieve suffering wherever he found it. And he always went out of his way to find it.

Study in the new science of bacteriology at John Hopkins, followed by several years of teaching and independent research in Washington, established him as one of the Army's and the country's foremost bacteriologists.

His spectacular experiments in Havana, daringly carried out on human beings, proved to the skeptical medical profession and the entire world that a common house mosquito was the villain solely responsible for the spread of one of the most devastating, baffling and persistent plagues of modern times—yellow fever.

An engaging and winning personality, Reed led a life full of interest. His childhood and youth were spent in Virginia, wracked by the Civil War and prostrated by the Reconstruction. The pursuit of his profession took him to New York's famous Bellevue and acquainted him intimately with the vice and misery of the slums of the 70's. His arduous life on western military posts was given an extra zest by the still urgent menace of the dispossessed and vengeful Indians.

Walter Reed's life is a record of serious and sustained effort climaxed, with rare and happy justice, by brilliant success.

From the dust jacket