Armstrong – Table of Contents

recollections of the events associated with LCM: “We got it (St. Louis encephalitis)
growing in monkeys but not in mice. We brought back a number of brains refrigerated. I
got a virus, which I thought was entirely different from studying the brains. I got the
history of the person from which the brain came; it was a colored woman and she had
died from what was thought to be St. Louis encephalitis. Unfortunately, the history on her
had been consumed in a fire in one of the annexes of George Washington University, so
we could never find if her clinical could fit in or not. It was a different virus, which we
called benign choriomeningitis, a horrible long name. Dr. Dickens and I, he was in the
Navy helping on it, proved it was a human disease. Dr. Rivers of Rockefeller confirmed
that. We said it goes from mice to men. Dr. Rivers said it was probably the other way.
But we found that mice were a continuing reservoir of the virus; that is if the mother has
little ones while she has had encephalitis, all the little ones will have the virus but no
symptoms and will continue carrying that for the rest of their lives and their offspring
will be infected. I carried through her 39 transfers down. Dr. Halls [EAB- Probably Dr.
V. Haas] then took over and he went through 200, I think, and they were still infected.
Down on E Street there was a black that had a trash collector, and in his big pile of trash
there were a lot of mice. He had a case in his family and one of his neighbors had a case.
We went down there trapping and found that well over 50 per cent of the mice there were
carrying this virus. We inoculated a healthy mouse and in a week it was dying of
encephalitis. We thought that was enough to indicate that it came from mice to men but
we had to clinch it. We found that on one side of E Street there was a heavy infestation of
choriomeningitis in mice, while on the other side of the street they were practically free.
It looked like mice didn’t cross a busy street; they had more sense than we had, while