Early and family life edit
Walter Reed was born on September 13, 1851,[1] at a cottage in Belroi, Virginia.[2] He was the youngest of five children born to Methodist minister Lemuel Reed and his first wife, Pharaba White.[3] His father's occupation meant that the family moved frequently throughout Reed's childhood, with the Methodist Conference sending him to places such as Gatesville and Murfreesboro, North Carolina, and Farmville, Virginia.[1]
Early military career edit
Yellow fever research edit
Personal life edit
Reed met Emilie Blackwell Lawrence while visiting his father in Murfreesboro. Because he was living in Brooklyn at the time, he courted her through a series of letters,[4] and the pair married on April 26, 1876.[5] Walter and Emilie had three children together. Their oldest, Walter L. Reed, was born in 1877 at Fort Apache, Arizona, while their daughter Emilie Lawrence Reed, known by her nickname Blossom, was born in 1883 in Omaha, Nebraska. Their third child, Susie, was an Indigenous girl who had been abandoned by her family after suffering severe burns in an accident. The Reeds took her in during their stay at Fort Apache, and she remained with the family for fifteen years before leaving home and losing contact with them.[6]
Later life and death edit
Legacy edit
See also edit
References edit
- ^ a b Bean 1982, p. 3.
- ^ National Register of Historic Places 1973, p. 3.
- ^ Lipscomb 1898, p. 31.
- ^ Pierce & Writer 2005, p. 89.
- ^ Dickerson 2006, p. 147.
- ^ Pierce & Writer 2005, p. 92.
Bibliography edit
- Bean, William B. (1982). Walter Reed: A Biography. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-0913-9.
- Crosby, Molly Caldwell (2006). The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History. New York, NY: Berkley Books. ISBN 0-425-21202-5.
- Dickerson, James L. (2006). Yellow Fever: A Deadly Disease Poised to Kill Again. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-59102-399-8.
- Kotar, S. L.; Gessler, J. E. (2017). Yellow Fever: A Worldwide History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN 978-0-7864-7919-1.
- Lipscomb, Bernard F., ed. (1898). Minutes of the One Hundred and Sixteenth Session of the Virginia Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Held at Portsmouth, VA, November 16-23, 1898. Richmond, VA: J. W. Ferguson & Son.
- Pierce, John R.; Writer, Jim (2005). Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered Its Deadly Secrets. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-47261-1.
- "Walter Reed Birthplace" (PDF). National Register of Historic Places. September 20, 1973. Retrieved March 9, 2022 – via Virginia Department of Historic Resources.