1950's Medicine and Health | Polio

Fear of Polio.

During the early 1950s no disease attracted as much attention as polio. A Gallup poll conducted in 1954 when the Salk vaccine was being tested indicated that more people knew about the polio vaccine tests than knew the name of the president. Polio struck children far more often than adults, and there seemed to be little a parent could do to protect against it. Moreover, it struck without regard to the victim's race or social class, and so it demanded the attention of both the medical and political establishments. When Dr. Hart E, Van Riper, the director of the NFIP, announced in 1953 that more cases of polio had been reported in the past five years than in the previous twenty, many parents failed to hear that he was optimistic about a cure.

Polio Warnings.

The rumor mill was pernicious as ever. Dr. Van Riper dispelled the notion that fruit, insects, animals, and bad genes cause polio. As polio tended...