Armstrong – Table of Contents

their next meeting on April 4, 1933. President McMaster also wrote, “Plan to be here
Commencement June 6th, when the degree will be conferred and be sure to bring your
wife who also has a warm spot in all our hearts.”
The May 1933 Mount Union College Bulletin (5), announcing Armstrong’s
address to the Annual Alumni Banquet, included a brief curriculum vitae and the
chronology to date of his scientific activities and achievements that were the basis of
awarding the honorary degree. To recapitulate: When he was an Epidemiologic Aide to
the Ohio State health Officer in 1919, initial public notice of his work came in connection
with his investigation of the botulinum toxin outbreak in Alliance and Canton, Ohio. His
was the first demonstration that spoiled ripe olives were capable of transmitting
botulinum poisoning. This investigation resulted in the revamping in the industry of the
canning procedure for ripe olives (especially in California). His next major study was the
investigation of the spread of influenza in an isolated (Kelleys Island) community. These
two investigations, impressive in their thoroughness, resulted in his assignment to the
Hygienic Laboratory in Washington, DC. His first major accomplishment in this
assignment was the demonstration that tetanus following smallpox vaccination was
caused by bunion pads contaminated by tetanus spores or by the presence of any type of
occlusive dressing over the vaccination site. He became interested in the complication of
postvaccinal encephalitis. On the basis of experimental data, he postulated concepts and
developed possible strategies for avoiding this complication. In his various duties with
the Hygienic Laboratory he carried out investigations of many diseases, accompanied by
the appropriate reports, including control of typhus fever among the Navajo Indians,
plague in Puerto Rico, milk-borne diseases, dengue fever, hay fever and poliomyelitis.