Polio: An American Story DAVID M. OSHINSKY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CONTENTS i POLIO ALSO BY DAVID M. OSHINSKY Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement The Case of the Nazi Professor (co-author) American Passage: A History of the United States (co-author) The Oxford Companion to United States History (co-editor) POLIO An American Story DAVID M. OSHINSKY 2005 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2005 by David M. Oshinsky Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oshinsky, David M., 1944– Polio : an American story / David M. Oshinsky. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-515294-4 ISBN-10: 0-19-515294-8 1. Poliomyelitis—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. RC181.U5O83 2005 614.5'49'0973—dc22 2004025249 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Jane Her love, her compassion, her sense of family; her extraordinary courage in the face of adversity—all make her the indispensable one. This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 1 The First Epidemics 8 2 Warm Springs 24 3 “Cripples’ Money” 43 4 “And They Shall Walk” 61 5 Poster Children, Marching Mothers 79 6 The Apprenticeship of Jonas Salk 92 7 Pathway to a Vaccine 112 8 The Starting Line 128 9 Seeing Beyond the Microscope 145 10 “Plague Season” 161 11 The Rivals 174 viii CONTENTS 12 “The Biggest Public Health Experiment Ever” 188 13 The Cutter Fiasco 214 14 Mission to Moscow 237 15 Sabin Sundays 255 16 Celebrities and Survivors 269 Epilogue 287 Notes 289 Selected Bibliography 328 Acknowledgments 333 Index 335 CONTENTS ix POLIO [...]... the kitchen and do what he did.”11 The feud between Salk and Sabin would outlive them both There is still an ongoing debate over which man produced the better vaccine and which vaccine should be used today What is certain, however, is that the polio crusade that consumed them remains one of the most significant and culturally revealing triumphs in American medical history POLIO: AN AMERICAN STORY 8 1... victims ranged from anonymous children to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Americans were primed to see polio as an indigenous plague with an indigenous solution—a problem to be solved, like so many others, through a combination of ingenuity, voluntarism, determination, and money One of the most common mantras of the post–World War II era, repeated by fund raisers, politicians, advertisers, and journalists,... most Americans as the March of Dimes They took stool and tissue samples from the patients for use, it was said, in a program to assist polio researchers in their quest for a vaccine They also directed supplies and personnel to San Angelo for those in need of aftercare, including wheelchairs and physical therapists, and provided money for medical bills The most serious cases were 4 POLIO: AN AMERICAN STORY. .. August polio outbreaks were reported in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and upstate New 22 POLIO: AN AMERICAN STORY York Among the towns under siege was elegant Hyde Park, the home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then a young assistant secretary of the navy From Washington that summer, Roosevelt instructed his wife, Eleanor, to keep their five children at the summer residence on Campobello Island,... Staten Island, which had the lowest population density and the best sanitary conditions of the city’s five boroughs Another study showed that recent immigrants living in the most congested parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan had a lower incidence of the disease than native-born Americans living in rural areas of upstate New York The same held true for New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the “wealthy” and “exclusive”... financial giants, including J Pierpont Morgan and Collis P Huntington, had begun to support medical education, and rumor had it that steel king Andrew Carnegie, 14 POLIO: AN AMERICAN STORY a noted philanthropist, was planning to build an institute for scientific research in Washington, D.C.13 There were family reasons as well In 1900 Rockefeller’s first grandson, 3-year-old John Rockefeller McCormick,... mysteries of polio How did it enter and travel through the body? How many different types of the virus were there? Why did polio primarily attack children and strike in hot weather? Why had it changed in recent years from a sporadic to an epidemic disease? Why did it thrive in the United States? 6 POLIO: AN AMERICAN STORY The vaccine quest had three main competitors: Albert Sabin, a longtime polio researcher... postvaccine Though poliovirus has long been present in the environment, the disease, for many centuries, caused little concern Unlike influenza, smallpox, and bubonic plague, it triggered no great pandemics or epidemics around the globe From ancient times 10 POLIO: AN AMERICAN STORY forward, poliovirus survived in endemic form, circulating freely in dreadful sanitary conditions and passing harmlessly... state health official of San Angelo’s predicament “All I INTRODUCTION 3 can do is repeat and repeat my warnings—clean up filth and breeding places of flies and insects And keep on cleaning up.”5 San Angelo bought two fogging machines to bathe the city in DDT Twice each day, flatbed trucks would rumble through the streets, spraying the chemical from large hoses while children danced innocently in the... Field As thousands of people arrived, and thousands more returned home from the war, San Angelo found itself connected to the larger world in vital, sometimes dangerous, new ways The late 1940s were flush years in the United States A booming economy encouraged Americans to marry, start a family, buy a house, consume In San Angelo as elsewhere, the pain and sacrifice of the Great Depression and World War . that the polio crusade that consumed them remains one of the most signifi- cant and culturally revealing triumphs in American medical history. 8 POLIO: AN AMERICAN STORY 1 The First Epidemics POLIO. ranged from anonymous children to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Americans were primed to see polio as an indigenous plague with an indigenous solution—a problem to be solved, like so many others,. recommended that San Angelo’s children avoid crowds, wash their hands regularly, get plenty of rest, and stay out of pools and swim- ming holes. “You can’t wave a wand and clear up polio, ” he said.