The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever On-line Collection (review)

A physician, professor of medicine, and Nobel Prize winner for his work in isolating cortisone and using it in the treatment of arthritis, Philip Hench was also a devoted student of the history of medicine. In particular, he was captivated by the story of Walter Reed's Yellow Fever Commission. As part of the U.S. Army occupation of Cuba, the Commission confirmed in 1900 that a particular mosquito was the vector that transmitted the disease. With the goal of writing the definitive history of this episode, Hench spent decades collecting documents written by or about Reed, his collaborators, and others involved in the fight against yellow fever and interviewing those who had known them. He died in 1965 before he could write his book, but fortunately for subsequent historians, his widow, Mary Kahler Hench, granted his accumulated papers on the subject to the University of Virginia, Reed's alma mater. In 1999, with funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the university began to digitize the nearly 5,500 documents Hench had gathered and thousands of additional related documents from its other archival holdings, so as to make them available online. For researchers interested in this fascinating and still misunderstood chapter in the history of U.S. medicine and empire, the resulting resource is simply indispensable.

The Web site provides brief biographical sketches of Reed and several other major figures who appear in the collection, as well as an overview of the work of the Yellow Fever Commission. If these pages fail to problematize the accounts of the early course of the Commission's investigation that were offered after the fact by Reed and his close friends Jefferson R. Kean and Albert Truby, then they are merely echoing dozens of works written on the subject. In any event, these passages can be useful to orient newcomers to the study of the history of yellow fever. Of course, the true value of the collection is in the documents.

And the documents are wonderful. Together, they constitute the single best source of information on a series of experiments that led to the eradication of yellow fever in Cuba and the end of periodic epidemics of the disease in the United States. Thousands of letters, notes, reports, and even entire books are presented, with scanned images of each page alongside transcribed text. The transcription allows the entire collection to be searched by keyword; one may also browse through the documents arranged by archival collection, series, box, and date. The scanned images, for their part, ensure that every detail is preserved and provide for quick and easy verification of the transcribed text; clicking on a scanned page brings up an even larger image of the document in a new window. Master lists of individuals and places mentioned in the collection ensure that misspellings or other errors that occur in the documents will not prevent a researcher from finding all of the sources he or she seeks.

In short, the Hench Collection is a nearly perfect online digital archive. Scholars interested in the history of yellow fever, U.S. colonial public health, the rise of experimental approaches in medical science, and many other topics will find it to be an invaluable resource. Archivists looking to bring their own collections to the Internet will find it to be a model worthy of emulation.