Medical scare hinted at COVID
Reflecting on the fear of polio, iron lungs, and the development of vaccines
This Flash from the Past was birthed by some flashes from the present.
The mid-March death of Paul Alexander, who had lived in an iron lung since 1952, was one. News of so many local grade school pupils kept unvaccinated by parents was another. Our whole COVID experience mirrored some of the past. The recent return of nearly forgotten diseases such as measles and polio was also a trigger.
Together they brought to mind the mid-century scare that my generation lived through: the fear of catching polio, a.k.a. poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis. Before the Salk and Sabine vaccines were introduced locally in 1956 and 1957, a threat hung over children, a threat that took the form of two four-letter words — iron lung.
Youngsters’ jests and parental overstatements (“Put your coat on or you’ll catch something and end up in an iron lung”) filled imaginative minds with all sorts of horrors. Detailed news stories described the few North American kids doomed to spend years in the dreaded machine, or perhaps to die.
Of course, the situation was magnified by exaggeration — few polio victims were stricken enough to require the iron lung. Although the contagious viral disease was easily transmittable, 75 per cent of those infected were asymptomatic (sounding familiar from our 20202024 experience) and most others had minor symptoms such as stiff necks and headaches lasting a week.
It was the remaining small percentage suffering paralysis and even death who became the terrifying face of polio. In those cases, the disease migrated to the central nervous system, resulting in muscle deterioration affecting various parts of the body, often the lungs.
This is not a medical essay nor have I any special medical knowledge but a quick look through the local polio/iron lung press reports helped recall those days from 1940 to 1960 that boomer kids lived through.
In the late 1930s, British car magnate Lord Nuffield promised an iron lung to any British Empire hospital requesting one. Ours arrived in mid-April 1940. With only his head showing, an unnamed Kitchener Daily Record reporter played guinea pig, spending a few minutes in the hermetically sealed wooden box with a tight-fitting neckpiece.
A second unit went to St. Mary’s hospital. Eighteen months later, neither had been used because no polio cases had occurred.
Within a decade the situation had changed. K-W Hospital’s new polio clinic was admitting patients from the entire area. In October 1952, 12 people were being treated locally, with four in iron lungs while a fifth unit was expected from Toronto.
An 18-month-old from Drayton had already died. Four patients hard hit during the 1952 epidemic spent many months in physiotherapy trying to resuscitate muscles devastated by the virus.
A July 1953 Record article detailed how their paralyzed legs, fingers, feet and arms were slowly recovering function.
Summer 1953 brought first word of a vaccine produced by Dr. Jonas Salk. Test vaccinations began that year and American results came back promising.
In April 1955, Kitchener medical officer of health Dr. Duff Wilson, after seeing further test results, said it “was almost too good to be true.” Dr. Philip Voelker of Waterloo echoed the sentiments.
They were also excited over initial results from a 3,000-pupil test in K-W schools. Early the following year, Wilson announced that Kitchener had been polio-free in 1955 and added that in 1956, some 8,700 children (including the author) would receive the doses, while those from the previous year would get booster shots.
In Waterloo, Voelker said all elementary and preschool children would be vaccinated in 1956. At the end of June 1956, Wilson announced that almost every Kitchener pupil had been vaccinated: The few exceptions were those whose parents had demanded exemptions.
Iron lungs evolved a long way from 1940 and other methods for better controlling victims’ breathing were developed.
Kids in the generation following mine perhaps never heard of the iron lung but for baby boomers, the words can still jump off a page at times such as the Paul Alexander story.
Think about it: 74 years.