Jesse William Lazear
American physician (1866-1900)
Jesse William Lazear (May 2, 1866 – September 25, 1900) was an American physician. In 1900, he deliberately allowed a mosquito to bite him to test the hypothesis that mosquitoes were the vector for yellow fever transmission. He contracted the disease but did not recover and died on September 25, 1900.
Background
Lazear was the son of William and Charlotte née Pettigrew. He attended Trinity Hall Military Academy and Washington & Jefferson College, both in Washington, Pennsylvania, and obtained his Bachelor of Arts in 1889 from Johns Hopkins University and his M.D. in 1892 from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He did his specialization in Paris at the Institut Pasteur. In 1896 he married Mabel Houston with whom he had two children. He was also a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.
Career
Lazear was a physician at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore starting in 1895, where he studied malaria and yellow fever. In 1900 he reported for duty as the assistant surgeon at Columbia Barracks (Quemados, Cuba) for the United States Army.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jesse William Lazear” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.