Medicine: Fighter Down

During the eighteen years that Dr. Charles Armstrong, 48, has been in the U. S. Public Health Service he has repeatedly risked his life investigating botulism, influenza, syphilis, spasms following vaccination, milk-borne epidemics,

“breakbone” fever,* parrot fever. During one study he contracted breakbone fever, during another parrot fever. The parrot fever attack made him particularly useful to the wife of Senator William Edgar Borah when she contracted that disease. Serum from Dr. Armstrong’s immune blood cured her. Dr. Armstrong’s current assignment is last year’s epidemic of sleeping sickness in St. Louis (TIME, Oct. 2, 1933, et ante). Last week he was working on the serology of the strangest of the St. Louis sleeping sickness cases when, too ill to continue, he went to the Naval Hospital in Washington. Neither he nor his colleagues know what is wrong. Most striking symptom was a rash down both his sides; most terrifying, the irrationality into which he occasionally lapsed. In his rational periods he feared that his condition might be the irremediable after effect of sleeping sickness picked up in St. Louis.

*A tropical disease of sudden onset, long convalescence, which causes severe pains in head, muscles, bones and joints. Other names: dengue, dandy fever, giraffe fever, bucket fever, knockel-koorts.