We’re standing here at the monument documenting the yellow fever epidemic that struck Norfolk in 1855. Dr. Walter Reed, a Spanish American born at Belroi, Gloucester county in 1851. He studied medicine and was searching for a cure when the Spanish American war erupted. He organized the U.S. Army Yellow fever Commission to understand the fever’s effects. Dr. Reed’s bold experiments in Cuba proved that the disease was spread by the bite of the mosquito aedes aegypti.