Armstrong – Table of Contents

the intracerebral inoculations of monkeys and mice. His colleague, Dr. Ralph D. Lillie,
assisted with the pathology studies.
Armstrong encountered the virus during serial passage of infectious monkey brain
derived from patient C. G., a fatality during the 1933 St. Louis epidemic. Her physicians
made a diagnosis of encephalitis of the type prevalent during the epidemic on the basis of
symptoms and signs pointing to central nervous system involvement. The patient, C. G.,
was a 42-year old African-American housewife with a past medical history of chronic
poor health for 12 years accompanied by “chronic constipation,” remote abdominal
surgery and underlying diabetes mellitus. Her final illness began August 13, 1933 with
general malaise, progressing to fever, severe headache, vomiting and drowsiness. Her
illness worsened, escalating to delirium and terminating rapidly in coma and death. The
detailed clinical, hospital and autopsy records could not be located at the County Hospital
where she died. The central nervous tissue including brain and spinal cord were sent for
initial investigative processing to the local research laboratory at Washington University
and were then transported to the NIH laboratory for further study.
Armstrong carried the virus strain from C. G. through 5 monkeys (rhesus no. 5, no. 18,
no. 37, no. 787, and no. 800). He considered the illnesses produced by these passages
similar to the six other strains isolated by himself and his colleagues. In a retrospective
examination, reinvestigation of the symptomatology and pathology of these early
transfers by Armstrong tended to confirm this opinion.
Armstrong described the initial isolation of the new virus as follows: “On
November 2, 1933, rhesus no. 37 was inoculated with brain material from monkey 800
(6th transfer). Monkey 37 had been inoculated twice previously (September 28 and