424 First European Journey 



laboratory procedures, bacterial cultivation methods, milk bac- 

 teriology, and other branches. A brilliant Canadian bacteriologist, 

 Dr. James Carroll, was elected to Smith's place as president of 

 the society. Smith was chosen the society's delegate to the Ameri- 

 can Association for the Advancement of Sciences.^* 



Carroll was the survivor of an heroic experience. He and Dr. 

 Jesse W. Lazear, with Dr. Walter Reed and Dr. Aristides Agra- 

 monte, had been members of the United States commission or 

 army board which had demonstrated that the mosquito, Aides 

 degypti, transmits intermediately the organism which causes yellow 

 fever. Voluntarily Carroll had permitted himself to be invalided 

 by the disease. He recovered and returned to the United States. 

 But Dr. Lazear, one of several truly great martyrs of American 

 experimental science, lost his life in Cuba.^^ 



Samuel C. Prescott of Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

 and secretary of the society reported to Smith, "We had a very 

 good meeting, the only drawback being that you were not there 

 to officiate." Smith had not prepared a presidential address or 

 presided at the meeting because on December 28 Mrs. Smith had 

 died. He had fought valiantly to save her life. He himself 

 examined the cultures made from her blood. From a culture of 

 the streptococcic infection. Dr. Rufus I. Cole, resident physician 

 of Johns Hopkins Hospital and later director of the Hospital of 

 the Rockefeller Institute, evidently prepared a vaccine. Dr. W. S. 

 Thayer wrote Smith after the end: " You have been so brave 

 throughout it all and it has been such a hard fight. But one thing 

 I think I may say. It was I fear a losing fight from the beginning. 

 The outlook in such cases is desperate and I fear that our hopes 

 were too much raised by the first improvements." 



In February he began to assuage his grief by writing his 

 " Reflections and Memories." His haunting fear that death ends 

 all cast heavy shadows on these pages but by April he was 

 believing, " If any human love can survive death I believe hers 

 will do so." By 1912 he concluded this " book " with a triumphant 

 resolution: " I have begun a memorial of her. It is to be verse 

 and prose. I have written 104 sonnets and various other poems." 



^^ Science, n. s., 25(647): 805-806, May 24, 1907. 



'° See also Charles Morrow Wilson, Reed of Virginia, Ambassadors in White, 

 The story of American tropical medicine, 98-124, N. Y., Henry Holt and Co., 1942; 

 concerning Carroll and Lazear, pp. 102-120. 



