Armstrong – Table of Contents

advice on psittacosis, deluged the desk of the Surgeon General. He turned the problem
over to Dr. McCoy, Director of the Hygienic Laboratory, who put Charles Armstrong in
charge of psittacosis research. On January 6, 1930 Dr. Armstrong headed a group of
physicians sent to Annapolis to see a case or cases of psittacosis.” Armstrong brought
back no suspect parrots on this trip, but soon he was bringing back suspect parrots from
Washington, DC, Baltimore and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Others were shipped in
from Maine and Ohio.
Experimental work on psittacosis commenced at the Hygienic Laboratory on
January 16, 1930. Readers interested in a colorful and life threatening account of Charles
Armstrong’s duel with psittacosis are referred to Chapter 6 titled “McCoy” in Paul
DeKruif’s book Men Against Death. (7). (The investigators at the Hygienic Laboratory
were favorite subjects about whom he wrote lovingly, sincere tributes in his flamboyant
“microbe hunter” style. Among the people he portrayed were Joseph Goldberger
[pellagra], Edward Francis [tularemia], Alice Evans [undulant fever = brucellosis] and
others. DeKruif received his doctorate at the University of Michigan in microbiology. He
started a promising career in research at the Rockefeller Institute but he resigned or was
terminated because of a professional impropriety. He embarked upon a literary career of
popular medical writing becoming well known, successful and prolific in the 1930-1940s
with many books and magazine articles. Later, he also became active and influential in
the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the March of Dimes. He was the
science adviser to the author Sinclair Lewis when the latter was writing the novel
Arrowsmith. DeKruif took this opportunity to draw viciously satiric portraits in the novel
of his former senior associates at the Rockefeller Institute (8)).