Qualla: Walter Reed Army Medical Center

Walter Reed Army Medical Center: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Major Walter Reed died on November 23, 1902, of complications from emergency appendix surgery at the Washington Barracks hospital, where he had been camp surgeon twenty years earlier. He was fifty-one years old. He had spent the final years of his life proving, through experiments on his colleagues and consenting volunteers - American soldiers and Spanish immigrants - in Havana, that yellow fever was transmitted not by direct contact - the consensus medical view of the time - but by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. His work made possible the construction of the Panama Canal, which had defeated the French in part because their workers kept dying of yellow fever in such numbers. Seven years after Reed's death, in 1909, the Army opened a new general hospital named after him on a 113-acre site on Georgia Avenue NW. The Walter Reed General Hospital, expanded in 1923 and rebranded as the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 1951, served as the Army's flagship medical center for 102 years.

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Walter Reed Army Medical Center: From Washington Barracks

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health and Medicine, CC BY 2.0. Walter Reed General Hospital had a predecessor: the small Victorian-era post hospital at Washington Barracks, what is now Fort Lesley J. McNair in southwest Washington. Reed had been camp surgeon there from 1881 to 1882, and returned later as Professor of Medicine and Curator of ...

Image: Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health and Medicine | CC BY 2.0

Walter Reed Army Medical Center: Pershing's Hospital

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1923, General John J. Pershing - by then U.S. Army Chief of Staff and the senior surviving commander of American Expeditionary Forces in World War I - signed an order establishing the Army Medical Center on the same Georgia Avenue campus as the Walter Reed General Hospital. Th...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Walter Reed Army Medical Center: The 2007 Scandal

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US gov, Public domain. In February 2007, The Washington Post ran a two-day investigation by Dana Priest and Anne Hull documenting conditions in Building 18 - the outpatient barracks housing wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. The building had mold on the walls, holes in the ceilings, rodents, a...

Image: US gov | Public domain

Walter Reed Army Medical Center: BRAC and Closure

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2005, eighteen months before the Building 18 scandal broke, the Base Realignment and Closure Commission had already recommended that Walter Reed close. The proposal was to consolidate it with the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, seven miles north, into a new joint-se...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Walter Reed Army Medical Center: The Name Lives On

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walter Reed himself remains one of the most celebrated American physicians of the late nineteenth century, primarily for the yellow fever work. He was born in Belroi, Virginia, on September 13, 1851, and entered the University of Virginia at fifteen - the youngest student in the ...

Image: Antony-22 | CC BY-SA 4.0