Remembering polio
On April 12, 1955, the Salk polio vaccine was announced, heralding the end of a terrifying era in U.S. history. Children's Hospital Boston marked the anniversary—and it's role in stopping the epidemic—on April 9 with a survivors' reunion and symposium co-hosted by Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Some 350 polio survivors, family members and clinicians attended from as far away as Arkansas. About 10 percent of the audience had been patients at Children's.
Moderator Michael Wessels, MD, Children's chief of Infectious Diseases, recounted how the hospital mobilized during the 1955 epidemic, the worst in Massachusetts history, which occurred soon after the vaccine was announced. Harvard surgeon Tenley Albright, MD, an Olympic Gold Medalist in figure skating, spoke movingly of her encounter with polio in the 1940s when she was 11, an experience she seldom discusses publicly. Claire McCarthy, PT, MS, emeritus director of Physical Therapy at Children's, narrated clips from a 1950s polio training film made by the late Dr. William T. Green, Children's Orthopedic surgeon-in-chief from 1940 to 1968. McCarthy, who appears in some of the footage, described acute and convalescent polio care at Children's, including muscle testing, physical therapy, the iron lung, hydrotherapy, bracing and practice in navigating stairs. (For excerpts, see www. childrenshospital.org/research and click on "Looking Back.") Richard Goldberg, EdD, author of The Making of Franklin D. Roosevelt, recounted FDR's polio experience, and Julie Silver, MD, of Spaulding, spoke on postpolio syndrome and the founding of Spaulding's Polio Oral History Project.
