Walter Reed

IAFF F151
The Walter Reed Tropical Medicine Course
Reed appears in sculpture on the great stone chancel screen at Riverside Church NYC. The research work with the disease under Reed's leadership was largely responsible for stemming the mortality rates from yellow fever during the building of the Panama Canal something that had confounded the French attempts to build in that region only 30 years earlier. Sternberg was one of the founders of bacteriology during this time of great advances in medicine due to widespread acceptance of Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease as well as the methods of studying bacteria developed by Robert Koch.

This insight gave impetus to the new fields of epidemiology and biomedicine and most immediately allowed the resumption and completion of work on the Panama Canal (1904–1914) by the United States. bacteriologist").