Armstrong – Table of Contents

In May 1942, Charles Armstrong became almost fatally ill from pneumonia
caused by the bacterium that causes tularemia. He was stricken shortly after arriving in
Hamilton, Montana while on a periodic inspection trip to the Rocky Mountain Laboratory
that was still part of the NIH/Division of Infectious Diseases. The Rocky Mountain
Laboratory was actively engaged in the production of vaccines, especially yellow fever
vaccine, for the United States Armed Forces during World War II. Armstrong was
continuing the oversight and support activity for the vaccine that originated with his
predecessor, Dr. R. E. Dyer who still maintained interest in the Rocky Mountain
Laboratory’s wartime efforts. The Hygienic Laboratory, the NIH and the Rocky
Mountain Laboratory were largely responsible for the existing knowledge of the
tularemia organism and its epidemiology (14). Its nomenclature is Francisella tularensis,
named after Dr. Edward Francis of the NIH-Hygienic Laboratory and Tulare County,
California where the organism was encountered in early studies. Dr. George McCoy (15)
discovered the bacterium in 1911 when he described a “plague-like disease of rodents”
while investigating bubonic plague among ground squirrels in California. In 1912,
McCoy and Chapin (16) recovered the organism from rodents in Tulare County and
named it Bacterium tularense. Wherry and Lamb (17) reported the first bacteriologically
confirmed human case in 1914. Francis (18), while studying the plague-like disease in
rodents and deerfly fever in Utah in 1919 and 1920, realized that both were
manifestations of an illness that was frequently bacteremic, coined the name “tularemia”
and commented on the role of the deerfly in transmission. Francis, a colleague and close
friend of Armstrong, spent the rest of his career in study of the laboratory aspects of the
organism and eventually had a non-fatal laboratory-acquired infection with tularemia. In