Armstrong – Table of Contents

1930s except for a few centers such as the Rockefeller Institute (10). There seemed to be
a cultural disdain among most early microbiologists for safety measures that they felt
would impede their professional manual proficiency in the laboratory.
Within a few short days, Armstrong was able to produce a transmissible illness
from sick to healthy birds either with cage droppings from infected birds or the ground up
tissue of a parrot that had died. Some of the sick birds died but others apparently survived
the infected material and many of these became asymptomatic carriers of psittacosis.
Armstrong submitted many infectious specimens for examination to Dr. Sara Branham
(11), a skilled Hygienic Laboratory bacteriologist, who hunted in vain for evidence of the
salmonella organism described by Nocard earlier in France. She was unable to find this
organism or any other bacteriologic organism in the material submitted to her by
Armstrong. Bacteriologic filters (12) did not hold back the agent that was producing
clinical and laboratory signs of infection with psittacosis in the healthy birds. Armstrong
had thus isolated a filterable agent that did not grow on the usual bacteriologic media and
that produced infection in birds.
Disaster struck on the morning of January 25 only nine days after Armstrong and
Shorty Anderson had begun their laboratory investigations. Armstrong, who was feeling
fine, came into the “old red brick building on the hill” and found Shorty, slumped over
his office desk, obviously very ill, with a high fever and complaining of a severe
“throbbing, splitting” headache. It was not difficult to presume that he had probably
acquired infection with psittacosis. This precipitated his admission to the old United
States Naval Hospital that was then adjacent to the Laboratory in downtown Washington,
DC Shorty’s illness worsened progressively. His hospitalization at this particular juncture