Politics of an Epidemic
ROGERS, NAOMI
Politics of an Epidemic Polio: An American Story By David M. Oshinsky Oxford. 342 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Naomi Rogers Associate professor of the history of medicine and of gender...
...But he does capture the "atmosphere of grief, terror and helpless rage" experienced by infected children and their parents, and by nurses and doctors working on hospital polio wards...
...It is the second half of the book, with its examination of rival virologists Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, that is most provocative and original...
...Oshinsky suggests that the virologist probably vaccinated his family after the initial trials...
...and the development of a new field of virology led by Simon Flexner of the Rockefeller Institute...
...In addition, Oshinsky is the first polio historian to confront the tricky questions of human experimentation in polio research...
...They bought two fogging machines and sprayed DDT twice a day to fight the flies and other insects believed (incorrectly) to be spreading the disease...
...He first skillfully convinced his law partner, Basil O'Connor, to take over fund-raising for Warm Springs, Roosevelt's polio rehabilitation retreat in Georgia...
...that the drug companies feared most...
...Except for a brief discussion of polio syndrome, Oshinsky regrettably has not integrated recent studies on disability history...
...would become the USSR...
...We learn that victims of polio can die, and how they die...
...During World War II, while he was a young researcher at the University of Michigan, Salk and his wife Donna were active members of a liberal community that raised money for Russian war relief and sought to pressure Ann Arbor barbers to accept both white and black customers...
...Neither President Dwight D. Eisenhower nor any Administration official thought the government should be involved...
...Next, when mass inoculations in the U.S...
...The fear and desperation of families was part of the process that produced one of the world's great scientific triumphs...
...Then he persuaded O'Connor to head a new philanthropy, formally incorporated in 1938 as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, that would play a dominant role in the battle against the scourge...
...City officials began a "clean up filth" campaign, targeting the "wetback" and "Negro" sections...
...In 1955, when President Eisenhower invited him to a White House ceremony to celebrate the successful completion of the vaccine trials, J. Edgar Hoover urged the President to read this long file, but Salk's fame as a celebrity scientist was too overpowering and Hoover was ignored...
...and Salk's subsequent quiet decision to test his vaccine first on youngsters at the Watson Home for Crippled Children (probably most of them disabled by polio) and the Polk School for the Retarded and Feeble Minded (many of whom were still vulnerable to polio...
...the debate over using institutionalized children in 1951...
...We also hear about Franklin D. Roosevelt's paralysis in 1921, and how his efforts to hide the disability in order to continue his political career made him a "master of concealment...
...Oshinsky traces not only the political fallout within Eisenhower's Cabinet, but the new debate that had Americans asking whether medical research funding was being distributed appropriately, and whether polio should not, in fact, be a "privileged disease...
...got under way in April 1955, instances of children seeming to be infected by the shots began to be reported, notably in the West...
...In truth," writes Oshinsky, "it was the model of democratic Canada...
...In all, there were 200 cases and 11 deaths...
...Reviewed by Naomi Rogers Associate professor of the history of medicine and of gender studies, Yale University...
...The complicated science of polio is explained succinctly, with few mistakes (no scientist ever believed the alimentary canal was the "portal of entry," however...
...It is based on a close reading of unpublished letters in the private papers of Salk, Sabin and their contemporaries, as well as on interviews with Salk's former colleagues, who perhaps felt they could speak more frankly now that both Sabin (1993) and Salk (1995) are no longer alive...
...Polio was viewed as a national crisis requiring an appropriate national response...
...Once the 1954 trials proved successful, there was a battle over the vaccine's control and distribution...
...the initial identification of the polio virus in 1908...
...Drug company lobbyists, meanwhile, cautioned Congress that "if the Salk vaccine is socialized," the U.S...
...Chiropractors promised that a "child's body correctly adjusted" would also prevent infection...
...The road ahead was not lined with velvet, though...
...Oshinsky's careful archival research, shrewd sense of Cold War politics and colorful style combine to illuminate a messy side of the March of Dimes' history—particularly the moment in 1946, not long after Roosevelt's death, when the major Hollywood studios announced they would no longer allow individual theater collections by the March of Dimes...
...author, "Dirt and Disease: Polio before FDR" IN 1949 the town of San Angelo, Texas, faced a growing polio epidemic...
...The seemingly positive results would soon make it the vaccine of choice...
...Ultimately, the problem was found to be a batch of improperly prepared vaccine produced by Cutter Laboratories of Berkeley, California...
...In 1959, the Soviet Union gladly served as an alternative testing site for Sabin...
...Thus, although he did join a group protesting the lynching of 14-yearold Emmett Till in Mississippi, he refused to have his name printed in a fundraising newsletter...
...But by the time Salk moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1947, he was no longer willing to be so openly associated with what he saw as "potential 'Left wing' groups...
...Aided by the "coercive powers of a police state," some 10 million children were given his vaccine without any control groups or placebos...
...By 1953, in a soothing pamphlet entitled "What You Should Know," the March of Dimes informed the public that Salk, his wife and three sons had been safely vaccinated...
...He discusses the use of state mental hospital patients by another Salk rival, Hilary Koprowski, in 1950...
...Equally impressive are Oshinsky's findings in a 300-page FBI file, which enable him to explore Salk's political background and transformation...
...In Polio, David Oshinsky tells the story of this special disease that was an integral part of Cold War America powerfully and thoughtfully...
...In a series of folders entitled "Field Trial Irregularities," the author found evidence that several North Carolina physicians stole the Salk vaccine during its 1954 trials and injected their own children and the children of friends...
...Frustrated by that change and the growing movement of federated charities like United Way, O'Connor's publicity staff came up with the idea of the March of Dimes poster child whose wide eyes and wistful look provided a needed boost in fund-raising...
...Clorox detergent advertisements in local newspapers warned mothers, "It's the dirt you don't see that does the damage...
...Doubts also lingered about Salk's killed-virus vaccine, causing the pendulum to swing toward Albert Sabin's oral live-virus vaccine...
...To the north, the government had taken immediate control of the polio vaccine with overwhelming popular support...
...those paralyzed by the disease fade quickly out of his story...
...David M. Oshinsky's engaging history recounts the scientific victory over polio in the context of the Cold War years, a period he knows well...
...But today, for reasons the book details, the World Health Organization is urging a phasing out of the Sabin vaccine and advocating reliance on the Salk vaccine...
...Flexner's work with rhesus monkeys and an overcultivated version of the polio virus resulted in his maintaining that the virus spread only through the body's nerve pathways—a theory not convincingly challenged until 1948, when Boston virologist John F. Enders and his team won the Nobel Prize for showing it was wrong...
...In Montgomery, Alabama, African-American children had to stand on the front lawns of local white schools to get their shots, and were barred from using the schools' bathrooms...
...By 1954 a polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk and funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (popularly known as the March of Dimes) was being tested in the world's largest clinical trial, involving 1.3 million American children...
...The early chapters cover familiar ground: the growing number of small epidemics, beginning with Vermont in 1894...
Vol. 88 • March 2005 • No. 2
