Armstrong – Table of Contents

of the ice. He hired a boy who had an iceboat to bring him across, but they fell through
the ice. Hopkins crawled out of the water, and he was rushed to the hotel, got some warm
clothes. When we [?] got word of what happened, we and some of the islanders decided
on a celebration. They had a bottle for the celebration. Hopkins, I suppose, never had a
drink of whisky in his life. He poured out a tall glass of the stuff. The islanders thought
he was going to finish it, but after a sip (an undetermined amount), Hopkins settled down
(into peaceful oblivion) much to the amusement of the assembled revelers.
“Hopkins was a great help. We made our study and prepared a thorough report. The first
case was a man who lived by himself. He had no contact with anybody on the island
except that he received something from his mother and we thought some of that had
become contaminated. About this time a man by the name of Nelson Dry [?] had a party,
a dance and nearly all on the island was invited. Within 3 days we began to see cases all
over the island. We asked the first case if he was at the dance, he was; did he dance with
a certain girl, he had; we traced practically every case back to this one man. We could
also trace the secondary cases, and it became a very common thing and gave us
information as to incubation period and was as an elucidating epidemic as had occurred.
[EAB – Armstrong’s memory many years after the events occurred do not quite coincide
with his published account of the epidemic, but the memories represent major features of
the epidemic that were of significance to him.] That kind of stirred up interest in my
work, and I was invited to come to the Hygienic Laboratory”.
Charles Armstrong, following the investigations of the botulism outbreak and the 1920
influenza outbreak on Kelleys Island, had indeed laid a solid scientific foundation for