Dr. Samuel Albert Cook was born on May 3, 1878, in Whitehall, New York. He completed his medical studies, lived and worked in his homeland until 1915, when, as a member of the American Medical Mission, he came to the aid of Serbian small and poorly equipped military medical sanity. He was particularly involved in the vaccination of ill-affected of typhus in Valjevo hospital, which actually consisted of two primary, one military, six reserve and a large number of field hospitals. From December 1914 to May 1915 in Serbia, during the typhoid epidemic, 35,000 Serbian soldiers, 35,000 prisoners and 120,000 civilians died. The focus point of the disease was Valjevo, in which nearly ten thousand people died from the end of December 1914 to the beginning of May 1915. The casualties included 3,500 Serb soldiers, 4,000 civilians and 2,000 Austro-Hungarian prisoners, and hundreds of sick died daily during the epidemic.
