Armstrong – Table of Contents

however, was short-lived since successive culture plates became contaminated with
common skin bacteria.
About the same time, I had to confront the problem of deciding how to plan my
training for the coming few years. Competition for residencies and fellowships at this
time was keen because of the preferential acceptance of the many young medical officers
returning from their World War II service who wanted to complete their training before
returning to civilian practice. In view of this situation, I decided that since I had
graduated from medical school at an age several years younger than most of my
classmates, I could afford to spend several years acquiring some laboratory experience in
infectious diseases prior to entering a residency training program.
When I discussed this with Dr. Hewitt, he suggested that I might be interested in
and profit from working at the National Institutes of Health in the Division (later
Laboratory) of Infectious Diseases. As mentioned previously, he had worked in the
Division, knew most of the prominent investigators and was personally friendly with Dr.
Armstrong, the current Chief of the Division. I did not know at that time about Dr.
Armstrong’s prominence as an investigator in microbiology, especially in virus diseases.
Dr. Hewitt described in glowing terms the scientific accomplishments of Dr. Armstrong.
Hewitt stated that, despite the modern custom of building huge bibliographies, Dr.
Armstrong had written only a modest number of research publications but that most of
them were of original research that made major contributions to the knowledge of
infections. Dr. Hewitt offered to arrange an interview for me with Dr. Armstrong at the
National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.