Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (Health & Medicine in American Society) [Paperback]

Naomi Rogers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1992 | Series: Health & Medicine in American Society

"Will have an enthusiastic audience among historians of medicine who are familiar, for the most part, only with later twentieth-century efforts to combat polio." --Allan M. Brandt, University of North Carolina Dirt and Disease is a social, cultural, and medical history of the polio epidemic in the United States. Naomi Rogers focuses on the early years from 1900 to 1920, and continues the story to the present. She explores how scientists, physicians, patients, and their families explained the appearance and spread of polio and how they tried to cope with it. Rogers frames this study of polio within a set of larger questions about health and disease in twentieth-century American culture. In the early decades of this century, scientists sought to understand the nature of polio. They found that it was caused by a virus, and that it could often be diagnosed by analyzing spinal fluid. Although scientific information about polio was understood and accepted, it was not always definitive. This knowledge coexisted with traditional notions about disease and medicine. Polio struck wealthy and middle-class children as well as the poor. But experts and public health officials nonetheless blamed polio on a filthy urban environment, bad hygiene, and poverty. This allowed them to hold slum-dwelling immigrants responsible, and to believe that sanitary education and quarantines could lessen the spread of the disease. Even when experts acknowledged that polio struck the middle-class and native-born as well as immigrants, they tried to explain this away by blaming the fly for the spread of polio. Flies could land indiscriminately on the rich and the poor. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped to recast the image of polio and to remove its stigma. No one could ignore the cross-spread of the disease. By the 1950s, the public was looking to science for prevention and therapy. But Rogers reminds us that the recent history of polio was more than the history of successful vaccines. She points to competing therapies, research tangents, and people who died from early vaccine trials. Naomi Rogers is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Like the outbreak of AIDS in the 1980s, polio's sudden appearance created a social crisis as well as countless individual tragedies. Jane S. Smith's Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine ( LJ 4/15/90) described the development of the Salk vaccine and the end of the epidemics that had terrified parents throughout the early 20th century. Rogers's book focuses on the first serious polio outbreak in the United States, the 1916 epidemic in the Middle Atlantic states. Accustomed to associating disease with poor sanitation, bad nutrition, and insect-infested neighborhoods, researchers were baffled by polio, an equal-opportunity disease that affected prosperous suburbs as well as the crowded tenements of Eastern European and Italian immigrants, and black neighborhoods hardly at all. Various theories of transmission were tested and rejected until epidemiologists discovered the ironic truth: Polio had been a common childhood intestinal disease that left almost everyone with lifetime immunity until improved sanitation made the disease increasingly rare and virulent. Rogers's narrative is a readable and well-illustrated blend of medical and cultural history. Appropriate for both public and academic collections.
- Kathy Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida-St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (May 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813517869
• ISBN-13: 978-0813517865
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,480,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A valuable piece of polio research, May 6, 2011

By 

Timothy J. Bazzett "ReedCityBoy" (Reed City, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (Health & Medicine in American Society) (Paperback)

I wish I'd read this book while I was writing my own polio book (LOVE, WAR & POLIO: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF YOUNG BILL PORTEOUS) a few years back. Because it's chock full of information and data about those earier polio plague times, the first few decades of the twentieth century. Rogers is a careful and painstaking researcher and documents it all with photos, charts, footnotes, endnotes and bibliography, some of which can make pretty dry reading. But she pays close attention to how polio and the widespread fear and misinformation about the disease affected nearly everything and everyone in those years. She also examines the prevailing theories on its spread and the methods of treatment tried during those troubled times. Most of these ideas and methods, it turns out, were wrong-headed and useless.

For anyone interested in learning more about this now nearly forgotten disease and the fear and panic it once caused in our society, DIRT AND DISEASE: POLIO BEFORE FDR will be a valuable resource.