When Dr. Charles Stiles of the U.S. Public Health Service came to the Bitterroot Valley in 1904 to study RMSF, he couldn’t replicate Chowning and Wilson’s findings of a protozoa that caused RMSF, so he pronounced that the tick theory was incorrect. None of them realized that they were looking for the wrong type of pathogen. The search for a definitive answer to the cause of RMSF continued.
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Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles became the first director of the Division of Zoology of the Hygienic Laboratory (precursor to the National Institutes of Health) in 1902. While he was proved incorrect about the vector for RMSF, he did important work on hookworm disease, then a scourge particularly in the South.
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Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1588
