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Congressional Gold Medal.com |
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Congressional Gold Medal Recipients
Jesse W. Lazear and Aristides Agramonte
Yellow Fever Experimentations Congressional Gold Medal Awardees: Jesse William Lazear and Aristides Agramonte
After two years at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania, Jesse W. Lazear (1866-1900) completed his undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins University in 1889. In 1892, after graduating with honors from two anatomy courses taught by Sir William Turner at the University of Edinburgh, Lazear received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Lazear returned to Europe to study microbiology following his post-graduate training at Bellevue Hospital. He worked at the Kaiserliches Institute in Berlin until March of 1895, then continued his studies in Paris at the Pasteur Institute. In 1895, Lazear accepted the position as head of clinical laboratories at the newly formed Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. At Hopkins he worked with William Welch and William Osler. He also assisted William Thayer and Thomas Futcher with their research in gonorrhea endocarditis and septicemia. In 1898, Lazear developed a method of using thyonin to stain malarial parasites. During the following year, after completing a paper on the pathology of malarial fever, Lazear and Thayer studied the relationship between the Anopheles mosquito and malaria that Sir Ronald Ross had recently established. In mid-January of 1900, with a strong recommendation letter from Dr. Welch, he applied to Army Surgeon-General Sternberg for a temporary assignment in the U.S. Army Medical Corps to study tropical diseases. Sternberg honored his request with an appointment to the Yellow Fever Commission.
Aristides Agramonte (1868-1931) was born in Puerto Principe, Cuba. After his father was killed by the Spaniards during the First Cuban War for Independence (1868-78), 3-year old Aristides and his family emigrated to the United States, where he was raised and educated. Agramonte earned his medical degree in 1892 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York and was subsequently appointed assistant bacteriologist with the New York Health Department. He continued in this office until May of 1898, when Surgeon-General Sternberg appointed him Acting Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army. Sternberg knew that, since Agramonte had acquired immunity to yellow fever from a mild childhood case in Cuba, he was the perfect choice to send to Santiago in July to study the yellow fever outbreak in General Shafter's army. There Agramonte performed autopsies in order to determine if Sanarelli's bacillus icteroides was in fact the causative agent of the disease. He found Sanarelli's agent in only three of ten victims. His work, in conjunction with Reed and Carroll's similar research in Washington, discredited Sanarelli's thesis. In December of 1898, Sternberg sent Agramonte back to Cuba after two bacteriologists from the U.S. Marine Hospital Service (later the U.S. Public Health Service) confirmed Sanarelli's discovery. The yellow fever outbreak in Santiago in the summer of 1899 provided Agramonte with an abundance of research material. Working side by side with the USMHS bacteriologists, Agramonte verified his previous findings: bacillus icteroides was not present in all yellow fever victims. In May of 1900, still in Havana as laboratory director of the military hospital, Agramonte received from Sternberg a letter of appointment to the Yellow Fever Commission.
Return to Awardees Walter Reed Yellow Fever Homepage
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