Henry Rose Carter (25 August 1852–14 September 1925), epidemiologist, was the son of Henry Rose Carter, a successful farmer, and Emma Caroline Coleman Carter. His elder brother Hill Carter served in the Convention of 1901–1902. Born at Clifton plantation, in Caroline County, Carter moved with his family in 1855 to North River plantation, in Hanover County, where he received much of his early education. He attended a Louisa County academy and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1873 as a civil engineer. Carter remained at the college for the 1874–1875 academic year as an assistant instructor in applied mathematics while also taking classes in modern languages. A broken leg and possible permanent disability turned his interest to medicine, and in 1879 he graduated from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. On 29 September 1880 Carter married Laura Eugenia Hook, of Cairo, Illinois. They had two sons and one daughter.
On 5 May 1879 Carter entered the Marine-Hospital Service (later the United States Public Health Service) as assistant surgeon. During the next decade he served at hospital stations in Boston; Cairo, Illinois; Memphis; New Orleans; and San Francisco. From January 1888 until 1892 he was quarantine officer at Ship Island, in the Gulf of Mexico off Biloxi, Mississippi, and at the Chandeleur Islands, off the coast of Louisiana. During this posting Carter prepared standardized regulations governing disinfection of ships and quarantine of ships' companies that became the basis for the United States maritime quarantine system.
Yellow fever became a major part of Carter's research while at Ship Island. Throughout the 1890s the hospital service posted him to areas suffering yellow fever epidemics, and in November 1897 he contracted the disease. His suppression of the epidemic in McHenry, Stone County, Mississippi, in 1898 was the first time the disease had been controlled in warm weather. Because yellow fever epidemics in Cuba were considered a threat to the United States, in January 1899 Carter was ordered to the island as an inspector and on 2 June of that year was detailed as a quarantine officer there. From September 1899 until February 1900 he served temporary assignments in Florida, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., before returning to Cuba and being promoted to chief quarantine officer on 21 June 1900. On the island Carter implemented his maritime quarantine and disinfection procedures. Carter's work during the Mississippi epidemic of 1898, which he described in an article for the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal in 1900, confirmed his hypothesis about the extrinsic incubation of yellow fever in an intermediate host. Carter's observation led to Walter Reed's identification of the mosquito as the conveyer of the disease. For this achievement Carter was nominated to share the 1906 Nobel Prize in medicine.
In 1904 Carter became chief quarantine officer of the Isthmian Canal Commission and from 1905 until 1909 was director of hospitals in Panama. He was second in command to Colonel William Crawford Gorgas in overseeing public health during the construction of the Panama Canal. That great engineering feat could not have been achieved without the work of Carter, Gorgas, and Reed. Because of Carter's outstanding work in combating yellow fever, he received an honorary LL.D. in 1910 from the University of Maryland, and his service in Panama led to his commission as assistant surgeon general on 6 March 1915, to date from 4 March.
From 1913 until his retirement in 1920, Carter studied malaria and used mosquito control to suppress the disease. For nearly two years after being placed on waiting orders he served as sanitary adviser in Peru. He published numerous articles on yellow fever and malaria, and during World War I he directed efforts to control malaria in army camps. Because Henry Rose Carter was one of the nation's leading epidemiologists, the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation asked him to write a history of yellow fever. Following Carter's death in Washington, D.C., on 14 September 1925 and his burial in Woodland Cemetery in Hanover County, Virginia, his daughter and assistant, Laura Armistead Carter, helped complete his manuscript, which was published in 1931 as Yellow Fever: An Epidemiological and Historical Study of Its Place of Origin.
Sources Consulted:Southern Medical Journal 8 (1915): 544–547; Jane Stafford, "Henry Rose Carter," Hygeia 4 (1926): 201–202 (portrait); Howard A. Kelly and Walter L. Burrage, eds., Dictionary of American Medical Biography (1928), 203–204; T. H. D. Griffitts, "Henry Rose Carter: The Scientist and the Man," Southern Medical Journal 32 (1939): 841–848; Elihu D. Richter, "Henry R. Carter—An Overlooked Skeptical Epidemiologist," New England Journal of Medicine 277 (1967): 734–738 (portrait); Henry Rose Carter Papers (including 1912 autobiographical sketch, bibliography of Carter's works compiled by his daughter, certificates and degrees, and letter from John W. Ross to the members of the Medical Nobel Committee, 9 Jan. 1906) and Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection, both Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Henry Rose Carter Papers, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md.; major publications include Carter, "A Note on the Interval between Infecting and Secondary Cases of Yellow Fever from the Records of the Yellow Fever at Orwood and Taylor, Miss., in 1898," New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 52 (1900): 617–636, "The Period of Incubation of Yellow Fever: A Study from Unpublished Observations," Medical Record 59 (1901): 361–367, and Yellow Fever, ed. Laura Armistead Carter and Wade Hampton Frost (1931), including bibliography of Carter's writings on 275; personnel records, U.S. Public Health Service, Record Group 90, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; obituaries in Richmond News Leader (editorial tribute on 15 Sept. 1925), 14 Sept. 1925, New York Times, Richmond Times-Dispatch (editorial tribute on 16 Sept. 1925), and Washington Post, all 15 Sept. 1925, Journal of the American Medical Association, 26 Sept. 1925, and Virginia Medical Monthly 53 (1925): 474; memorials in Boston Evening Globe, 24 Nov. 1925, and American Journal of Tropical Medicine 5 (1925): 385–388.