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Polio, April 2005
Hardcover
An American Story
Oxford University Press
April 2005
368 pages ISBN: 0195152948 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio
and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found.
Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio
terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the
March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin
vaccines--and beyond. Here is a remarkable portrait of America in the early 1950s,
using the widespread panic over polio to shed light on our
national obsessions and fears. Drawing on newly available
papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players,
Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the
cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious
rivalry between Salk and Sabin. Indeed, the competition was
marked by a deep-seated ill will among the researchers that
remained with them until their deaths. The author also tells
the story of Isabel Morgan, perhaps the most talented of all
polio researchers, who might have beaten Salk to the prize
if she had not retired to raise a family. As backdrop to
this feverish research, Oshinsky offers an insightful look
at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which
was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor. The
National Foundation revolutionized fundraising and the
perception of disease in America, using "poster children"
and the famous March of Dimes to raise hundreds of millions
of dollars from a vast army of contributors (instead of a
few well-heeled benefactors), creating the largest research
and rehabilitation
network in the history of medicine. The polio experience also revolutionized the way in which
the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing
them on the market, and the way in which the legal system
dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products.
Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that
polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media,
but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in
baby-booming America--increasingly suburban,
family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed--the specter of polio,
like the specter of the atomic bomb, soon became a cloud of
terror over daily life. Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative
social and cultural history, Polio opens a fresh window onto
postwar America.
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