Armstrong – Table of Contents

to carry out a well-controlled spraying program in time to avert epidemics of
poliomyelitis. No further serious attempts materialized to extend the concept of spraying
noses for polio prophylaxis.
In the Wyndom Myles oral history, Armstrong made the following comments (18):
“I did have one experience with zinc sulfate, with alum first, and then with picric acid. I
found if you put that in the nose of a monkey, you could drop poliovirus in the nose and
they wouldn’t come down. It was thought that the infection was spread through
respiratory methods and it looked as though it might be worthy of a trial. So, [?] DeKruif
came through the lab one day and I showed him the results. He became very excited and
went down to see the Surgeon General. I wasn’t quite ready to let loose of it yet, but the
Surgeon General gave me orders to get ready to proceed to the South where they were
having a great deal of polio and try this treatment. There were some questions that hadn’t
been answered yet, just what it would do to the sense of smell, and what the dangers
were, and whether it would be effective in man. I went to Michigan to see a worker [Dr.
Max Peet?] there, and I said I did not know whether any (one) could reach the
membranes of a human like you can a monkey. He said it would be much easier in a
human than a monkey, and he said he thought it would work. So, I went down to
Alabama. We asked the people to get the doctor to give this spray treatment, but that
didn’t last long. The patients would be all yellow with picric acid, and if you’d go to the
movie, they would be giving it to everybody when they came out of the movie; they’d get
a bottle of picric acid. The results came through, and it looked as though the picric acid
had not helped. I was able to withdraw the experiment, so I wasn’t blamed for to put
anything over that was unreasonable.” Armstrong did not pursue this method further.