Bailey Ashford
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Colonel Bailey K. Ashford was born in Washington D.C. in 1873 and died in 1934. He was one of five children in the family of a prominent physician. His general education was obtained at the public schools and at Columbia University (now George Washington University). In 1896, he graduated from the Georgetown University Medical School and, during this period served as resident physician in several area hospitals.
As a recently commissioned lieutenant in the United States Army Medical Corps, he accompanied the military expedition to Puerto Rico in 1898. Serving as the medical officer in the general military hospital in Ponce, Puerto Rico, he was the first to describe and successfully treat North American hookworm in 1899. He was a tireless clinician and conducted an exhaustive study of the anemia caused by hookworm infestation, which was responsible for as many as 12,000 deaths a year. From 1903–1904, he organized and conducted a parasite treatment campaign, which cured approximately 300,000 persons (one-third of the Puerto Rico population) and reduced the death rate from this anemia by 90 percent.
Captain Ashford was a founding member of the Puerto Rico Anemia Commission and, by special authority of the Secretary of War, served on the Commission from 1904–1906. In 1911, his proposal for an Institute of Tropical Medicine in Puerto Rico was approved by the legislature. After serving as a commander of the Army Medical Department’s First Division during World War I, Colonel Ashford was assigned to San Juan and campaigned for the development of “a real school of tropical medicine in the American tropics”. The School of Tropical Medicine of Puerto Rico was formally dedicated in 1925. After a 30-year Army career, Dr. Ashford assumed a full time faculty position at the school and continued his interest in tropical medicine. The building (see drawings[1]) in Puerta de Tierra, San Juan just east of the traditional center of the Puerto Rican capital, is one of the few examples, along with the University of Puerto Rico campus, of a unique hispano-american architectural style.
In his honor, the main avenue in the San Juan, Puerto Rico district of "El Condado", bears his name as well as Ashford Presbyterian Community Hospital, also in Condado, Puerto Rico. His home in Condado, Puerto Rico is being renovated.
His writings include: Anemia in Puerto Rico published in 1904; Uncinariasis in Puerto Rico published in 1911; and A Soldier in Science published in 1934.
After his death in 1934, his remains were interred in Puerto Rico National Cemetery in the city of Bayamón.
