Armstrong – Table of Contents

children into physicians’ offices, the spraying should be carried out in the open. The local
authorities, through the extensive coverage by the lay press, attempted to advise and
educate the public about the aims and the hopes of the spray.
By consensus, Birmingham and the surrounding county of Jefferson, Alabama
were selected as the most suitable locations in which to begin study of the effect of the
spray. What Armstrong and the State Health Department hoped to be a reasonably
controlled and directed field study evolved into a protocol-abandoned pandemonium. A
minority of physicians preferred not to employ an experimental procedure; others felt that
the parents could be taught to do the spraying – after demonstration and instruction in the
procedure. They encouraged the parents to purchase the materials and to spray their own
families. The newspapers printed the formulas for the solutions that the local pharmacists
could mix, and the families could purchase the sprayers from the pharmacies. The
overwhelming majority of the physicians were solidly aligned with the efforts of the
Health Department. Armstrong wrote: “It soon became evident, largely through the
activity of the people themselves, that what we had hoped would be a test by and under
the profession, had become a test by the masses, largely uninstructed, upon the masses,
with all the variations of methods which such a procedure implies. The same thing
happened in Tennessee and Mississippi where spraying was also instituted. In a surveyed
area, only 57 from 1,153 families were regularly sprayed by physicians.” This restrained
statement masked Armstrong’s frustration and anger at the authorities’ helplessness in
controlling a panicked population faced with a frightening, mysterious, perceived
community danger.