Armstrong – Table of Contents

sealed shut for what was to come next. McCoy had sent for the fumigation squad from
the Quarantine Station at Baltimore, Maryland. When all the people were out of the North
and South Buildings by 2:00PM, McCoy turned the fumigation squad loose to begin
fumigating the tightly sealed empty building with heavy applications of cyanide gas
designed to exterminate any residual creeping or crawling creatures in the building. The
legend goes that so much cyanide was used, sparrows flying 50 feet over the building,
stopped in mid-flight and plummeted to earth.
The laboratory epidemic ran from January through March 1930. The last four
patients left the hospital early in April. Since there were still unanswered questions that
needed to be addressed, McCoy transferred psittacosis research to the Quarantine Station
at Curtis Bay near Baltimore Harbor in April. Armstrong had recovered fully by this
time. He set up a laboratory in a deserted building on the Station with the help of a new
assistant, Mr. Lanham. Lanham had worked in the Hygienic Laboratory as a night
watchman and had also recovered from his laboratory-acquired psittacosis. McCoy
considered that both Armstrong and Lanham were immune and unlikely to become ill
again from psittacosis. Armstrong realized that he would be away from his Washington,
DC home for a long period, so he moved his family, his wife and daughter, to Curtis Bay
for the summer. He invited his interviewer and friend, DeKruif, to visit him at Curtis Bay
but the latter found “many excuses” to decline the invitation (18).
While he was at Curtis Bay, in addition to further investigative studies, Armstrong
prepared an epidemiological review (16) that he presented June 18, 1930 in Washington,
DC to an annual meeting of Public Health Service and State and Territorial Health
Officers. He recorded that the causative organism that had been discovered almost