Yellow Jack: A History by Sidney Howard

Based on the dramatic "Walter Reed" chapter of Paul De Kruif's Microbe Hunters, this 1934 Broadway play depicts how Major Walter Reed of the U.S. Army Medical Corps worked with a group of volunteer human "guinea pigs" who allowed themselves to be bitten by mosquitoes and infected with yellow fever, a frequently deadly disease with no known cure, in order to prove that the illness was transmitted by the bites of mosquitoes and not by direct human contact or by contact with urine, feces, or soiled clothes or bedding.