While the story of the defeat of Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) would not be complete without Dr. Ralph R. Parker, Parker’s story encompasses many more diseases and research accomplishments. Parker was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and went to the Massachusetts Agriculture College. In 1914, Robert Cooley, who was the State Entomologist of Montana but who had also been born in Massachusetts and gone to Massachusetts Agricultural College, invited Parker to come to Montana to study flies and the transmission of typhoid fever. The next summer, Cooley invited Parker to Montana again, this time to study RMSF. Parker did this work on the Powder River in eastern Montana.
Montana must have fascinated Parker. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1915 and getting married, he and his new wife moved to Montana, living in the same log cabin where he did work for the Montana State Entomological Board. He hunted game so that he and his wife could collect ticks from them for his research. Their living and working conditions were upgraded just a little in 1918 when they moved to the Bitterroot valley to work in a woodshed in the town of Victor. It was known that ticks transmitted RMSF through their bites, so Parker looked for a way prevent transmission by controlling ticks as well as doing more in-depth studies into the transmission of the disease.
In 1921, the incidence of the often-fatal RMSF in the Bitterroot valley was rising, so Montana asked the U.S. Public Health Service to resume working with them on the problem. The laboratory was moved from the woodsheds in Victor to much more spacious and substantial quarters in the empty Canyon Creek Schoolhouse near Hamilton in September 1921. And Parker and his wife bought a real house and ten acres of land for their home the next month.
The relationship between Parker, who worked for the State of Montana, and Dr. Roscoe Spencer, who was the Public Health Service officer in charge of the laboratory, was an arrangement that worked despite of its awkwardness. Spencer developed the vaccine in the Hygienic Laboratory (precursor to the National Institutes of Health) in Washington, D.C., but more tests and then production of the vaccine occurred in the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory, which was run by Parker when Spencer wasn’t there. It was the production of the vaccine that led to the construction of a building especially designed for scientific work and which replaced the schoolhouse in 1928.
Parker and Spencer collaborated on studies of other diseases as well. Tularemia and its transmission were another of Parker’s passions, whether it was transmitted by ticks, deer flies, or the pathogen Pasteurella tularensis which he found in ground water. He also studied Q fever, a bacterial infection that can cause heart valve problems, and which is often transmitted by breathing in contaminated air around infected animals such as livestock. Plague was first reported in Montana under Parker.
In 1930, the whole operation became part of the U.S. Public Health Service, and Parker became director of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Choosing the right people for the job was one of Parker’s talents as an administrator. He convinced Dr. Herald Cox to join the laboratory to try to make producing the vaccine easier than requiring many stages of tick feedings. Cox lived up to Parker’s expectations by developing a way to grow the pathogen in chick embryos instead. This method is still used in the preparation of many vaccines. Dr. Mason Hargett was also enticed to the laboratory by Parker just before World War II. Yellow fever could have become a terrible problem for U.S. troops during the war, but Hargett and the Rocky Mountain Laboratories produced a vaccine that erased that national security concern.
When Parker died unexpectedly in 1949, he left behind contributions in many areas of tick and other insect transmitted diseases. For example, in 1937, he discovered a rickettsia (a group of small bacteria that cause various diseases in people and are transmitted through insect bites) isolated from the Gulf Coast tick, Amblyomma maculatum. This bacterium, which is also a cause of a spotted fever, was characterized as a unique Rickettsial species in 1965 and named Rickettsia parkeri in honor of its discoverer. That’s a fitting tribute for a person who increased our knowledge about insect-borne diseases so much.
“Ralph R. Parker,” Victor Haas, Science Magazine, Vol 111, January 20, 1950, page 56-57.
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-6
Dr. Ralph Parker reads correspondence at his desk at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory, circa 1948. Notice the labeled binders on his desk and in the bookcases behind him which indicate just a few of his research interests: tularemia, bullis fever, mud and water sampling, drugs (for treatment). In addition are examples of his role as first director of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in binders containing monthly reports and construction project documents. On Parker’s desk is an assortment of reports and correspondence and even a box or two of reagents waiting to go on the shelf behind him.
Span
id
credit
class
credit
Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1466-3
Div
class
grid-row grid-gap
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-6
Roscoe Roy Spencer (1888-1982)
In many ways, Dr. Roscoe R. Spencer’s career in the Public Health Service spanned two distinct periods in the Service: in the earlier period, most officers deployed several times across the U.S. to investigate outbreaks of known and unknown causes; and in the later period, they often stayed at the National Institutes of Health for most of their career. Spencer’s involvement in creating a vaccine for Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) shares elements of both of these periods.
Unlike Robert Cooley and Ralph Parker, with whom he would work on RMSF, Spencer was a physician, not an entomologist. Born in West Point, Virginia, Spencer joined the Public Health Service after getting his A.B. degree from Richmond University in 1909 and his M.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1913. Then his life as a Public Health officer moving from assignment to assignment began. He was in Victor, Montana, in 1915 (just before Parker) working on programs to control ticks, hoping that would limit spread of RMSF. During World War I, he was detailed to the U.S. Navy as a Sanitary Advisor—proper sanitation was the only way to prevent many diseases at the time. In that role, he went to Pensacola, Florida, to head up bubonic plague control efforts. After the war ended, he spent three years in New Orleans, Louisiana, also leading plague-suppression efforts.
His best-known work began in 1922, when he was assigned to work with Parker, an entomologist employed by the State of Montana. They were to investigate an RMSF outbreak in the Bitterroot Valley. They knew that RMSF was spread by tick bites but had not been able to culture the microorganism carried by the ticks, so they investigated infected ticks as a potential source of an antigen for a vaccine.
Spencer developed the RMSF vaccine in Washington, D.C., not in the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. On May 24, 1924, Spencer became the first human exposed to the new vaccine when he inoculated himself. He then went back to Montana to complete more trials of the vaccine with Parker and to set up vaccine production, traveling back and forth many times. In 1930, the American Medical Association awarded Spencer its gold medal for this work.
Then came the beginning of Spencer’s more modern experience as a Public Health Service officer. After leaving the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory to return to Washington, D.C., in 1928, Spencer continued his medical bacteriology research at the Hygienic Laboratory, which became the National Institutes of Health in 1930. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the act creating the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Carl Voegtlin became director of the new institute and appointed Spencer his assistant director; Voegtlin was neither a physician nor a career Public Health Service officer. Spencer, who had no training in cancer research, accepted the assignment and requested a laboratory to conduct research.
Spencer became director of the National Cancer Institute in 1943, when Voegtlin retired, but stepped down himself in 1947, having served during the difficult years of World War II. Spencer was the consummate Public Health Service officer, not an administrator; he left just in time to miss the next era of the Public Health Service: the era of Big Science.
Roscoe R. Spencer died at the age of 93 after enjoying several years in Florida.
Dr. Roscoe Roy Spencer in his U.S. Public Health Service uniform.
Span
id
credit
class
credit
Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1576
Div
class
grid-col-12
Dr. Roscoe Roy Spencer poses at his desk, May 10, 1928. Note the candlestick-style telephone connected to a large telephone box. Spencer came across as unassuming and pleasant but, as evidenced by his socks, he was secretly bold, giving the first dose of Rocky Mountain spotted fever vaccine to himself to test its safety and efficacy in humans.
Span
id
credit
class
credit
Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1576 and 1577
Div
class
grid-row grid-gap
Div
class
grid-col-12
In Memoriam
“What shall we say of the some twenty-five workers, who fully appreciating the dangers incident to the daily routine, still continue at a rate of compensation not higher than the gain in other kinds of work in which these dangers are lacking. We may say, at least, that idealism and the spirit of sacrifice for the general good have not died out.”
(Quote: “The Cooperation with the United States Public Health Service,” Robert A. Cooley, Eighth Biennial Report, Montana State Board of Entomology, 1929–1930, page 10.)
The 25 workers who Cooley wrote about included people working for both the State of Montana and the U.S. Public Health Service. Three of these researchers died during the years that the Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) work was being done at the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. Cooley had taught two of them—William Gittinger and Arthur Kerlee—at Montana State College. On June 6, 1929, Cooley dedicated the Gittinger-Kerlee memorial plaque at Montana State College to his former students.
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-6
William Edwin Gittinger (1899-June 30, 1922)
William Gittinger graduated from high school around 1918. He then attended the Montana State College, graduating from Dr. Robert Cooley’s entomology program. He hoped to go to medical school but took a job as a junior laboratory assistant in the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. He had only worked there a short while when he was infected by Rocky Mountain spotted fever and died on June 30, 1922. He was almost 23 years old and left his mother, two sisters, and a brother. According to Lucy Salamanca, after Gittinger died, Dr. Roscoe Spencer posted a sign on the laboratory door: ‘‘Persons entering these premises do so at their own risk!”
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-6
Span
id
credit
class
credit
Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 3521
Div
class
grid-row grid-gap
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-6
George Henry Cowan (January 8, 1886- Oct. 29, 1924)
George Cowan was born in Victor, Montana. His parents were among the original White settlers of the area. A field station for studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) was located in Victor before moving to the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory in Hamilton, Montana.
Cowan joined the RMSF investigation in 1913 and was the longest-serving field worker at the time of his death. The Montana State Board of Entomology made him deputy chief of tick control work in 1921, and he continued that work with the U.S. Public Health Service in the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. Cowan helped to collect ticks and when he shot a certain mountain goat, more than a thousand already engorged ticks were picked off of it. Dr. Roscoe Spencer tested to see if the ticks caused RMSF, discovered that ticks had to be fed before they became infectious, and got the idea to grind the ticks into an RMSF vaccine. Unfortunately, the vaccine was not completed before Cowan became ill with RMSF and died in October 1924.
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-6
Span
id
credit
class
credit
Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1575
Div
class
grid-row grid-gap
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-6
Arthur LeRoy Kerlee (March 5, 1905-February 14, 1928)
Arthur Kerlee was born and educated in Darby, Montana—a local boy studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) at the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. He graduated from Montana State College in 1927 with a B.S. in Botany and Bacteriology. Robert Cooley was one of his professors. After graduating, Kerlee became an assistant bacteriologist in the U.S. Public Health Service at the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory. He co-authored a paper with Dr. Roscoe Spencer on the Weil-Felix reaction as a diagnostic test for RMSF.
Kerlee died during production of the RMSF vaccine. Because he had already received the vaccine, his death caused some consternation in the Bitterroot Valley until it was found that he had only received the first shot and had become ill either right before the shot or right after the shot, meaning that his immunity had not had a chance to develop.
A large number of Bitterroot Valley citizens attended his funeral, which included a quartet and a military tribute from the American Legion because he had been made a 2nd lieutenant in the reserve officer’s training corps. He left a father, four brothers, and two sisters. One of his brothers, James, joined the Canyon Creek Schoolhouse laboratory in tribute to his sacrifice.
Div
class
desktop:grid-col-6
Span
id
credit
class
credit
Image: Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, 1578
