Armstrong – Table of Contents

foundry job entailed piecework, so he was able to make $4 to $5 per day before the
summer was over. Through a loan from relatives, supplemented by his summer savings,
he was able to return to Johns Hopkins for his second year. The following summer he
worked as a teacher of biology and geology in the summer school program at Mount
Union College. With additional summer work and loans from his family he was able to
graduate from Johns Hopkins with his class in 1915. On the whole, his medical school
experience was an enjoyable one. After graduation he took and passed the Maryland State
Board of Medicine examination to practice medicine.
He had expected to go into the practice of medicine. In view of this goal, he
applied for and was accepted in 1915 into a 2-year rotating internship at New Haven
General Hospital, the teaching hospital for Yale Medical School, New Haven,
Connecticut. Here he found the contacts with patients, fellow interns, residents, students
and faculty most stimulating. He finished the first internship year and started the second
year when he suddenly came face-to-face with fiscal reality as he began thinking about
starting a medical practice. He was in debt for his education, and he had no money saved
from his meager internship salary. In order to start a practice he would have to establish
an office, purchase an automobile, pay salary for one or more nurses, and he would need
a wife. Contemplating the further borrowing of additional major funding seemed to him
like an almost impossible obstacle to his plans for practice. One evening while he was in
the midst of trying to resolve these conflicting decisions, he saw an announcement on the
hospital bulletin board of examinations to be given within a week for applicants seeking
admission to the Commissioned Corps of the United States Public Health Service.
Applications were to be addressed to the Surgeon-General. A letter of inquiry from Dr.