Overview
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.
Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for History
Editorials
Jerome Groopman
David Oshinsky, a professor of history at the University of Texas, frames the conquest of polio within the cultural upheavals of the time. Polio: An American Story is a rich and illuminating analysis that convincingly grounds the ways and means of modern American research in the response to polio.— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
A case of polio in Mecca during this year's hajj and the threat of the disease spreading received major attention in the New York Times. This is the year the World Health Organization has targeted for the elimination of polio worldwide, and 2005 is the 50th anniversary of the polio vaccine which publishers are celebrating, perhaps prematurely. PW gave a starred review to Jeffrey Kluger's Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio. Here are three more books on polio.POLIO: An American StoryDavid M. Oshinsky. Oxford Univ., $30 (432p) ISBN 0-19-515294-8. The key protagonists in historian Oshinsky's (Univ. of Texas, Austin) account of the bruising scientific race to create a vaccine are Jonas Salk, a proponent of a killed-virus vaccine, and Albert Sabin, who championed the live-virus vaccine. As revered as these men are in popular culture, Oshinsky records their contemporaries' less complimentary opinions (even Sabin's friends, for instance, describe him as arrogant, egotistical and occasionally cruel). Oshinsky (A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, etc.) looks at social context, too, such as the impact of the March of Dimes campaign on public consciousness and fear of polio. Tying in the role polio victim FDR played in making the effort a national priority, the precursory scientific developments that aided Salk and Sabin's work, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding human testing, Oshinsky sometimes bogs down in details. But all in all, this is an edifying description of one of the most significant public health successes in U.S. history. 46 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.School Library Journal
Adult/High School-This well-grounded account documents the quest for a polio vaccine. It reveals professional rivalries and clinical breakthroughs, describes a new era in approaches to public philanthropy, and re-creates the tenor of American culture during the 1940s and '50s, when every city, suburb, and rural community faced potential tragedy from annual outbreaks of the disease. The decades-long contentious relationship between doctors Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk provides the centerpiece of this story. Virologists were split into two main camps: those pursuing the development of an attenuated live-virus vaccine versus those focusing on a killed-virus vaccine, with adherents of the latter believing it would prove not only safer and more effective, but also quicker and cheaper to mass produce. Historical context is provided by detailing how Franklin D. Roosevelt raised public awareness, how his influence led to the emergence of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the March of Dimes, and the subsequent creation of the "poster child" concept as a way of creating grassroots fundraising. The writing dramatically captures both tensions and ethical dimensions inherent in moving from laboratory work with monkeys to human experimentation and, eventually, to implementation of a massive inoculation program reaching 1.3 million schoolchildren in the 1954 Salk vaccine trials. While this part of the story and the public adulation of Salk have been told elsewhere, Oshinsky amplifies the tale with data explaining why the Sabin oral vaccine became the one preeminently adopted internationally, and why the debate has continued. Sixteen pages of arresting black-and-white photographs are included.-Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.From The Critics
Reviewer: Ralph D. Arcari, Ph.D.(University of Connecticut Health Center)Description: The author has successfully written for lay persons a history of the effort to eradicate polio in the United States. Major subjects include disease mechanisms, prevaccination treatments, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and the Salk (killed virus) vs. the Sabin (live virus) vaccine competition.
Purpose: The book's purpose is to provide insight into the political, economic, and scientific factors that resulted in the development of polio vaccines. Providing a window into the personalities and ambitions behind the ostensibly altruistic goal of disease eradication is a worthwhile reality lesson. The author is objective and evenhanded in his portrayal of the rivalries associated with development of a polio prevention vaccine.
Audience: The author is a university-based historian who has written well-received books on non-medical topics. The author is qualified to write for a lay audience, which he has done with this book. He is not qualified to write for medical professionals or biomedical researchers.
Features: After providing background chapters on polio as a disease; its most famous victim, the 32nd president of the United States; and the machinations of polio-related philanthropic foundations, the details of the competition between Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin are fully explored. This book is a straightforward history with well-captioned photographs. A timeline for major polio events and a graph indicating the number of polio victims by year from 1900 - 2000 might have been useful.
Assessment: This book complements and updates Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine by Jane S. Smith (William Morrow, 1990). Both books are written for the nonprofessional. The Smith book, however, as its title indicates, focuses much more extensively on Salk. For a general overview of polio with an assessment of the careers of both Salk and Sabin and an update on the efforts of the WHO to eradicate polio worldwide, the Oshinsky book is recommended.
From the Publisher
"A rich and illuminating analysis.... The story of polio captures all the drama of high-profile and high-stakes research in an America in social flux: the tension between sober scientists and sensationalistic media; experimental disagreements grounded more in envy and ego than in technical details and data; contested credit for breakthroughs between those who labor at the laboratory bench and those who work at the patient's bedside."--Jerome Groopman, The New York Times Book Review
"Narrative history doesn't get much better.... Oshinsky illuminates Salk's competitors...and after Salk's triumph, he turns to Albert Sabin, whose live-virus vaccine became officially preferred before mass immunization with Salk's was finished. He confirms...that Sabin was a real SOB as well as a good scientist, but...airs trenchant criticism of Salk, too. Further, he brings the story down to the recent reemergence of Salk's vaccine and the present, when the WHO hopes for polio's ultimate eradication in 2008."--Booklist (starred review)
"Teases out the broader context of polio as a historian should."--Financial Times
"An easily approachable yet factually rich narrative.... Oshinsky provides a very readable and enlightening history that also can be appreciated as good storytelling."--Science
"Excellent.... Oshinsky does a good job of recounting famous tales from the war on polio.... The book also unearths some of the fascinating forgotten stories."--The Economist
"Readable, often exciting, filled with ambitious characters, it is science writing at its most engrossing.... Oshinsky brings to compelling life the work and conflicts among these researchers and their killed-versus-live-virus approaches..... 'Polio: An American Story' is definitive, an accessible and memorable account of the great American gift for, occasionally, pulling together across generations, races and economic divisions."--Floyd Skloot, Newsday
"Oshinsky vividly retells one of the greatest of all American success stories and reveals the clash of egos and interests, science and salesmanship that made it possible. Its fresh details will fascinate both those too young to remember polio's scourge and those of us who experienced it firsthand."--Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt
"As we live through modern-day epidemics like AIDS and SARS, David Oshinsky's compelling Polio reminds us that the struggle is over more than a disease. In this riveting story of America's battle with polio, we learn that government, philanthropy, media, 'big science,' and public fear were all powerful factors to be reckoned with as well. If polio no longer plagues America, its legacy shadows us still. Be prepared for an infectious read."--Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
"The fight against polio was a landmark in medicine, and anyone interested in American history or epidemiology would enjoy reading this account."--Science News
"Polio: An American Story is a comprehensive and succinct detailing of a disease that caused public panic and a national mobilization of all arenas to research and find a solution to this menace...[This book] serves as a blueprint for confronting future public health challenges and a reminder of the success that can be achieved when all efforts are mobilized to work toward a solution from a problem affecting a nation's population."--Nursing History Review
4 Stars! from Doody