A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors [Paperback]

Mr. Tony Gould (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0300072767 | ISBN-13: 978-0300072761

This work is a comprehensive account of the poliomyelitis epidemic. It takes the story from the first major outbreak of "Infantile Paralysis" in New York in 1916 - which induced panic on a scale reminiscent of the great plagues of history - through to its lingering aftermath in the shape of the so-called, and still mysterious Post-Polio Syndrome. This account combines several strands - biographical, political and social - as well as clinical and microbiological. It focuses on those individuals who were influential in the treatment and "conquest" of polio - from the most celebrated polio sufferer of all, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who set up his own hydrotherapy centre at Warm Springs in Georgia - to the scientific rivals, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, caught up in the race to produce a viable vaccine. The story also features John Enders, the Nobel prizewinner who made the crucial breakthrough in the laboratory; FDR's lieutenant, Basil O'Connor, whose "March of Dimes" became a byword for successful fund-raising; and Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the nurse from the Australian outback who challenged medical orthodoxy and invented "miracle" cures. In Britain, despite ten years of increasingly severe outbreaks, it took the death from bulbar polio in 1959 of an international footballer, Jeff Hall, to etch the importance of polio prevention on people's minds. The second part of this book examines the experiences of polio survivors on both sides of the Atlantic and concludes with a moving autobiographical account of the disease and resulting disability.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Jonas Salk's recent death reminds us of one of this century's most dramatic triumphs in public health?the conquest of polio, at least in Western nations. People over 50 readily remember the fear inspired by the disease, the March of Dimes fundraising campaigns, and their relief when Salk's vaccine became available. This entertaining, anecdotal history of the disease and its defeat includes the social and political issues involved. Gould particularly concentrates on personalities, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Salk, Albert Sabin, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, and Basil O'Connor, creator of the March of Dimes. We are told in detail about the vicious controversies involved in the struggle to understand the disease and to develop a vaccine. The second half of the book provides personal accounts of British and American paralytic polio sufferers, including the author himself. While there are several other excellent books on this topic (Naomi Rogers's Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR, LJ 7/92, and Jane S. Smith's Patenting the Sun, LJ 4/15/90), none takes this work's particular anecdotal, dramatic, and detailed approach or covers so much social and personal history. For public and academic history of medicine collections.?Marit MacArthur, Auraria Lib., Denver, Col.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (October 20, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300072767
• ISBN-13: 978-0300072761
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #359,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A GRIPPING HISTORY OF POLIO IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY., September 25, 1998

By 

JACK TROMBADORE ([e-mail]) (Somerville, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (Paperback)

From Jack Trombadore Book Reviews New Jersey Polio Network Newsletter, Spring 1996

For anyone who has survived polio, the year, summer, indeed, the day that he or she first had polio will always mark the time of the Plague, "The Crippler," as it was known for many decades, whether that time is personally recalled or recounted by family members. In A Summer Plague, Polio And Its Survivors, award-winning author Tony Gould, who had polio at age twenty in 1959, while a junior officer in the British military in Hong Kong, gives us a wide-ranging and thoroughly gripping history of polio throughout its most destructive period, the twentieth century, and the ways in which this country and most of Western Europe coped with this scourge. Gould acknowledges that most of the world's population has not yet received anti-polio vaccine and that much remains to be learned about post-polio syndrome. In the 1970's and into the 1980's there was an increasing medical ignorance about polio; "people troubled by its after-effects were dismissed by doctors either as hypochondriacs or, worse, neurotics in need of psychiatric treatment."

Polio first appeared in epidemic proportions at the end of the nineteenth century in Scandinavia, with the first major outbreak in the United States in 1916 in New York City. During the week of August 5 there were 1151 reported cases of polio with 301 deaths in the city. The authorities and families with young children were overtaken with panic; as many as 50,000 children of the well-to-do were sent out of the city to places considered safe from the epidemic. On the other hand, cities, Hoboken, for example, absolutely forbade all-nonresidents from entering; on July 18, 1916, police turned away 150 families trying to enter Hastings-on-Hudson. Children from poorer sections of the city were quarantined that year for up to eight weeks regardless of being asymptomatic. It was later found that wealth, poverty and/or living conditions were all irrelevant. Many cases went unreported by families fearing the quarantine. For some months it was believed that cats and dogs were responsible for the spread of polio, and many thousands were rounded up and destroyed. Nationwide in 1916 there were 27,000 reported cases of polio with 6,000 deaths, 2,343 of these in the city.

No account of polio in the United States would be complete without a retelling of the story of FDR who contracted polio in 1921 and believed for most of his remaining years that strenuous exercise, massage, and warm water bathing would cure him and restore his useless legs. The March of Dimes, Warm Springs, Ga, Sister Kenny, Drs.Salk and Sabin, and Basil O'Connor are familiar names, but, nevertheless, Gould provides an insightful and in-depth study of this cast and of the events shaped by them and others in medicine and in the politics and intrigues of medical rivalries. Politics was never absent from the constant struggle for money for treatment and rehabilitation and research for a preventive vaccine.

The conflicting methods of after-care treatment including rigid splinting with braces to prevent deformity of the back and limbs, as opposed to massage, exercise, physiotherapy, including hydrotherapy, engendered furious medical debates. Sister Kenny, who had no formal medical training, was always at the center of the storm advocating the abandonment of braces and iron lungs which she called "torture chambers." She did not come to the United States until 1940, and was rebuffed by the medical profession in spite of her isolated "miracles" on "hopeless" cases with the use of hot packs to relieve muscle spasm and a regime of exercise for muscle re-strengthening and muscle re-coordination. Her battles with American orthopedic surgeons never ended, and Gould believes that their attempts to discredit her arose out of professional jealousy.

The research for a preventive vaccine ended with the fabled successes (and incredible enmity) of Dr.Salk and his "killed" vaccine and of Dr.Sabin with his "live" vaccine.

Gould relates his own personal initial harrowing experiences with polio and those of other survivors in the later chapters of this memorable, fascinating, no-holds-barred history, including first-person accounts by Dr. Lauro Halstead and by Joan Headley, Executive Director of GINI, Gazette International Networking Institute.

Must reading for everyone!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A human interest textbook with empathy and heart., October 24, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (Hardcover)

It needed doing and done it he has - combine the wish to understand Polio the disease in detached historical and dispassionate terms but to balance it with empathy and understanding of those who suffered Polio. "Suffered" proves to be the wrong word - "overcame", "conquered" are better. The human stories with which Tony Gould concludes his book inspire the reader. The total is a two part masterpiece - the facts and the reality. A text book with heart, stories with depth. A wonderful and worthwhile way to use the eyes, stretch the mind and lift the heart.