Armstrong – Table of Contents

could recall no symptoms compatible with a central nervous system or meningeal illness.
2) Meningeal type: Often biphasic with initial fever, headache, stiff neck, vomiting,
Kernig’s and Brudzinski’s signs (of meningeal irritation) and appearance in the spinal
fluid of many white blood cells, primarily lymphocytes. 3) Meningo-encephalitic type:
Signs of meningitis plus somnolence, disturbance of deep tendon reflexes, weakness,
paralysis and some loss of sensory perception. 4) Asymptomatic type: Presence of
positive serum antibodies without recollection of compatible illness.
Armstrong wrote several excellent review articles in the early 1940s summarizing
the knowledge acquired to date, largely by him, about the disease (37, 38, 39). These
included The Harvey Lecture of The New York Academy of Medicine, October 1940
(37), a review of the same subject appearing in The Transactions and Studies of the
College of Physicians of Philadelphia, April 1940 (38), and The Kober Lecture of 1942
at Georgetown University, May 1942 (39). The local and national press media (40)
covered widely Armstrong’s laboratory discoveries of LCM and the associations between
virus, mice and men.
The press also covered rather extensively an illness that occurred around
November 1934, about one year after Armstrong returned from St. Louis. He was
hospitalized for about three weeks at the United States Naval Hospital in Washington,
DC with “fever, skin eruption, and delirium.” No definite diagnosis was made other than
“encephalitis”. On January 25, 1935, The Washington News reported in an Armstrong
related news release that he had recently recovered from encephalitis.
In order to get another perspective, the following verbatim excerpt from the
Wyndom Miles oral history interview in 1966 describes some of Armstrong’s