Armstrong – Table of Contents

“March of Dimes” for the annual fund raising appeal, and the White House became
inundated with avalanches of dimes coming from collection venues (churches, movie
theaters, etc.) in towns, cities, and counties all over the United States. On January 3,1938
the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis was incorporated and Basil O’Connor was
named president. He located the Foundation headquarters several floors below his law
office at 120 Broadway, New York City. He directed the Foundation activities with direct
supervision and superlative efficiency for many years. He established many committees
dealing with relevance to administration, fund raising, patient services and research. The
Virus Research Committee was composed of distinguished and accomplished scientists
including Charles Armstrong. The Foundation established many local chapters that
collected funds and provided help to patients.
In mid-1938, with ample funds available, the Research Committee made its first
grants to the Yale University Poliomyelitis Unit. The prominent members of the group
included Drs. John Paul, James Trask, Dorothy Horstmann, and later Joseph Melnick. In
1933, Paul and Trask suggested that there were strain differences among polioviruses that
were shown later to exist in three immunologic types. In 1938 they, along with other
investigators, found polio regularly in stools of patients, and experimentally, monkeys
and chimpanzees. The Yale group, under Paul’s leadership, undertook many
epidemiological studies. Horstmann and her colleagues first detected the presence of
viremia in infected subjects; this helped explain the spread of infection from the gut to
the central nervous system. Another prominent group of investigators who contributed to
the understanding of polio infection consisted of David Bodian, Howard Howe, and
Isabel Morgan working at Johns Hopkins University. In 1941, Bodian and Howe