Henry Rose Carter

It shows him in his Public Health Service uniform sometime after 1915, when he attained the rank of Assistant Surgeon General. Carter was a quarantine officer and a field epidemiologist, best known for his discovery in 1898 of the extrinsic incubation period of yellow fever. His discovery led directly to the historic finding by Reed, Carroll, Agra-monte, and Lazear in 1900 that mosquitoes are the intermediary hosts of the infecting agent that causes yellow fever. A member of a distinguished Virginia family, Henry Rose Carter was born in Caroline County, Virginia, on August 25, 1852. He graduated as a civil engineer at the University of Virginia; took special courses in mathematics and applied chemistry at the same institution; and studied medicine at the University of Maryland, graduating in 1879. That same year, Carter joined the Marine Hospital Service (MHS), later the United States Public Health Service. Carter's initial MHS assignments placed him at the center of the yellow fever maelstrom. In 1879, he was detailed to Memphis and other southern cities, then in the throes of a second year of devastating epidemics. There began his lifelong interest in the epidemiology and control of yellow fever. The Deep South of the United States, where Carter conducted most of his work on yellow fever, was affected by periodic outbreaks of the disease. This highly fatal disease had long been a scourge in the United States, especially in port cities. Lack of scientific understanding fueled these outbreaks. In 1793, for example, when a major outbreak of yellow fever struck Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush, the leading resident doctor, thought the fever came from a batch of spoiled coffee from a ship in the harbor. Not until 1900 did Walter Reed and his colleagues solve the mystery by proving that yellow fever was spread solely by mosquitoes. Until then only a few people, including Carter, were pursuing the cause of yellow fever in a methodical, scientific way. In 1888, Carter was assigned to the Gulf Coast Maritime Quarantine Station at Ship Island, Mississippi. Here, and at subsequent quarantine station postings along the US Gulf Coast, he thoroughly reviewed the rationale for quarantine policies with a view toward establishing uniform regulations and more thorough disinfection of vessels and minimizing interference with naval commerce. Crucial to the success of these activities was Carter's attention to the incubation period of yellow fever. Carter ably directed the MHS epidemiologic control …