Armstrong – Table of Contents

to fall. By morning she was feeling much better. We were never sure it was the serum
that cured her; we couldn’t protect mice with the serum at all. However, Senator Borah
was convinced that it saved her life. He was a very influential man at that time and very
helpful to the service.” These homely musings were recollection of events many years
after their occurrence, events in which Armstrong played a major, pioneering, discovery
role.
Initially the Hygienic Laboratory performed the early experimental studies with
the psittacosis agent but gradually other prominent scientists became involved
investigating the nature of the organism. Almost simultaneously in the early 1930s, Drs.
Ralph D. Lillie of the Hygienic Laboratory, A. C. Coles of the Lister Institute in London
and Walther Levinthal of the Robert Koch Institute at Dahlem, Germany reported the
presence of distinctive clusters of inclusion bodies in the cytoplasm of patients who had
died of psittacosis (23). These became known as “Lillie–Coles–Levinthal” or “L–C–L”
bodies and are present in diseased tissues caused by other members of the group of
organisms with which the psittacosis agent has been identified. Dr. Thomas Rivers (23)
studied the agent in other laboratory hosts finding the white mouse especially susceptible
to infection. The agent can grow in embryonated chicken eggs and in tissue culture cell
lines. Dr. Karl F. Meyer of the Hooper Institute, University of California San Francisco
School of Medicine was also a prominent, early investigator of psittacosis. He coined the
term ornithosis because the agent can be carried by many species of birds besides parrots
(psitticine birds). Over the course of the ensuing years up to the present, the group of
agents, of which psittacosis is one member, has been studied extensively in the laboratory
and in the clinic. These agents have been classified as Chlamydiae.