A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (review)

Tony Gould describes A Summer Plague as a “voyage of discovery and self-discovery” (pp. xv–xvi). An award-winning English journalist, Gould contracted polio when he was twenty, and over the next decades he was “so busy ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘denying’ my disability” (p. xvi) that he never had time to place his personal experience in a larger social and medical context. The writing of A Summer Plague provided him with the opportunity to investigate the history of polio and interview others of his generation who contracted the disease: “The testimony of witnesses,” he suggests, “would give resonance to the history, and vice versa” (p. xvi). The book also has a second agenda. Gould had heard about a so-called Post-Polio Syndrome: polio survivors of his generation were reporting a sudden and somewhat inexplicable loss of muscle strength, and debilitating fatigue. This new vulnerability frightened the group and led some among them to form support groups and share experiences that had been repressed for decades.

The result of these investigations is a book that is well written and informative, although to historians of medicine it is not groundbreaking. In the first half, Gould retells the well-known story of FDR’s encounter with polio, the founding of Warm Springs and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), the controversies that surrounded the work of Sister Kenny, and the fierce competition between Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin to create and disseminate a vaccine. As a skilled journalist, Gould focuses mainly on individual ambition and achievement. He gives less attention to structural issues, such as the organization of scientific research, human experimentation, or the impact of polio on the organization of health care.

The second half of the book presents life histories of men and women who contracted the disease in the 1940s and 1950s. Gould conducted interviews in both England and the United States, exploring the encounter with the disease, the process of rehabilitation, and the ways in which the earlier disability affected adult lives. He highlights tensions and conflicts between individual ambition and the societal attitudes toward disabled persons. These life histories are extremely poignant. They mingle pathos with anger, sarcasm with self-denigration; frustration with accounts of courage in the face of failure. These polio survivors, like Gould himself, carry a sense of having been “born too soon” (p. 188)—that is, before the discovery of the vaccine. Some recall being initially “lionized as heroic examples of human fortitude,” but after the vaccine was disseminated they were “suddenly ignored as embarrassing emblems of their own poor timing, clumsy enough to get polio before the vaccine that could have protected them was found” (p. 188). Gould’s informants are remarkably frank. They do not deny persistent pain and fatigue, hide the way their disability limited their ambitions, or dissemble their fears for the future.

Gould discovered that the experiences of polio survivors in the United States and in England were very different. In England, he notes, the disease “never had the same urgency. . . . there was no pressure group comparable to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis” (p. xiv). The English polio patients felt far more isolated and recalled spending long periods in austere hospitals whose visiting policies were prison-like. In the United States, the trauma and the process of rehabilitation were partially eased by the extensive resources of the NFIP and by the image of individuals like Roosevelt who had triumphed over disability. Why the difference? Gould does not address the question. Was it mainly because polio was the president’s disease? Or was the treatment of those who contracted polio similar to the care that other chronically ill people received? Remember that in the case of tuberculosis, patients also received different care in England and the United States: both countries relied on sanatoriums, but in England the facilities were more spartan and the residents labored longer and harder than their counterparts in the United States.

In sum, A Summer Plague is...