Lab tech Henry “Shorty” Anderson slumped in his chair, holding his head. A horrible headache and high fever announced that despite his best efforts to keep the disease contained, he had caught psittacosis. His boss, Dr. Charles Armstrong, took Anderson to the Navy hospital next door on the 25th and E Street NW campus where #NIH was then located. Every day for nearly two weeks, Armstrong visited Shorty in the hospital, promising that he would make sure that Shorty’s bills would be paid on time. Shorty would die on February 8, 1930; on that day, Armstrong was admitted to the hospital with psittacosis, although he would recover. Several other NIH staff members would also get ill. NIH director George McCoy shut down research on the disease, carried by parrots being given as Christmas presents, allowing only himself to clear the two basement rooms where Anderson and Armstrong had worked before having the entire building fumigated. Henry Anderson was memorialized for the Congressional Record by Representative Anthony Griffin (NY) on February 11, 1930: “Yesterday there was interred in Arlington Cemetery the mortal remains of one who may be truly said to have given up his life for the benefit of humanity. He made the supreme sacrifice, not in the midst of stimulating alarums of war but in the silent laboratory -- with no hope of praise or reward other than the consoling consciousness of toiling for his fellow men. Who was this man with the heart of the soldier and the soul of the martyr? His name is Harry Anderson. He was a soldier, too, for he served in the World War, from which he came unscathed only to meet his end as a humble laboratory assistant in the United States Public Health Service.”