Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors

By Daniel J. Wilson

Polio was the most dreaded childhood disease of twentieth-century America. Every summer during the 1940s and 1950s, parents were terrorized by the thought that polio might cripple their children. They warned their children not to drink from public fountains, to avoid swimming pools, and to stay away from movie theaters and other crowded places. Whenever and wherever polio struck, hospitals filled with victims of the virus. Many experienced only temporary paralysis, but others faced a lifetime of disability.

Living with Polio is the first book to focus primarily on the personal stories of the men and women who had acute polio and lived with its crippling consequences. Writing from personal experience, polio survivor Daniel J. Wilson shapes this impassioned book with the testimonials of more than one hundred polio victims, focusing on the years between 1930 and 1960. He traces the entire life experience of the survivors—from the alarming diagnosis all the way to the recent development of post-polio syndrome, a condition in which the symptoms of the disease may return two or three decades after they originally surfaced.

Living with Polio follows every physical and emotional stage of the disease: the loneliness of long separations from family and friends suffered by hospitalized victims; the rehabilitation facilitieswhere survivors spent a full year or more painfully trying to regain the use of their paralyzed muscles; and then the return home, where they were faced with readjusting to school or work with the aid of braces, crutches, or wheelchairs while their families faced the difficult responsibilities of caring for and supporting a child or spouse with a disability.

Poignant and gripping, Living with Polio is a compelling history of the enduring physical and psychological experience of polio straight from the rarely heard voices of its survivors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9780226901060

Book preview

Reviews for Living with Polio

[setnahkt · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I couldn’t figure out the cover picture at first. A cute little girl is looking out a window. A woman is reading to her – Alice in Wonderland. Something about the perspective didn’t seem right, though. It took me the longest time to realize what I was seeing was not a girl looking out a window, but a girl’s reflection in a mirror; the mirror is at a 45° angle to the viewer; the little girl is lying on her back below the mirror. But all you can see is her head, because the rest of her is in an iron lung.
Author Daniel J. Wilson is a history professor; this is a work of human history, not history of science or medicine. There isn’t much about how the poliomyelitis virus works, how you contract it (except that it is “contagious”), or details of what it does. I did learn that better than 90% of the people who contracted “polio” had no permanent effects and probably never realized they had polio – just what must have seemed like a summer cold or a food-borne illness. I also learned that it is almost entirely a 20th century disease – the first documented epidemic was in Vermont in 1894 (Wilson doesn’t speculate, but I assume there was polio around before, but just isolated cases rather than epidemics, and most of the cases just disappeared into the abyss of pre-modern medicine as just another unexplained way a child could die).
For the unlucky 10% things were a lot worse than a summer cold of food-borne illness. The patient was usually prostrated by pain and fever, so it was the parents (it was primarily a disease of the young) who learned the diagnosis, after a spinal tap. In the really severe cases it could kill in hours, in the severe it paralyzed the lungs, in the merely bad it went after the legs. Most of the patients Wilson quotes had the disease in the last great outbreak in the early 1950s; the United States was quite a different place then and there was sometimes an attitude that illness was some sort of personal failing. The young victims moaned apologies to their parents or their God for whatever it was they had done to deserve what was happening to them as they lost their muscles one by one.
Rehabilitation started after the “crisis” was over, and Wilson notes repeatedly that the American work ethic was well in evidence; if you worked hard enough you would be rewarded. Often the work really was hard; therapists stretched muscles to keep them from withering in position, the process was torture-chamber painful, and the only relief offered was aspirin. But sometimes – often - hard work actually did pay off, people could learn to use different muscle groups to do things, and walking with crutches or breathing without an iron lung were possible. Maybe awkward and uncomfortable, but possible.
There was no ADA in the 1950s, so a “recovered” polio patient going back to school or a job had to learn to climb stairs and negotiate other obstacles. Lots faced social difficulties – neighbors brought their own children inside when a girl with a leg brace went outside, and one went so far as to confront her parents for letting someone like that appear in public. A man who finally got a job was fired the day after people from headquarters visited – they didn’t want any cripples in their company. Once again persistence often paid off, and most of Wilson’s subjects finished school and found jobs (Including the author; he is a polio survivor himself, although he never mentions how severe his case was).
These are oral histories, though, not a scientific review. Wilson’s subjects are a self-selected group; they are obviously the people who didn’t give up, who finished school, who found jobs, who didn’t let polio beat them. We don’t hear the stories of the people who surrendered and died, and there undoubtedly were many.
I have a very dim memory of the 1950s epidemic; I was four years old when the Salk vaccine came out. The thing I remember most clearly is that I was promised a “Davy Crockett at the Alamo” play set if I could make it through the whole series of shots without crying. I lost it at the last one and never got Davy Crockett.
It wouldn’t do any good to make this required reading for antivaxxers; they would just dismiss it as propaganda from Big Pharma or accuse Wilson of being a shill. About all we can hope for is natural selection takes care of them.
Excellent book, within the constraints of way the subject is handled; I think I want another book that takes up the medical, epidemiological and biological aspects to complement this one. Well indexed and referenced; the bibliography includes a lot full length books by the people Wilson interviewed. Illustrations of people in braces, wheelchairs, and iron lungs.

[timbazzett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wilson's book was one of my most valuable resources when I was researching my own book, LOVE, WAR & POLIO. It is chock full of important historical information on the periodic polio epidemics that swept the country in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as information on how the disease was treated and how patients were housed - often "warehoused" - and how they and their families coped or failed to. My only complaint - more of a disappointment really - was that there was very little personal information from Wilson, about his own struggles with polio, as a child and an adult. But make no mistake. This is an extremely well researched and an important document on a once-terrifying disease.