Episode 3 | The Polio Epidemic

Cement City

Audacy | Cement City Productions

Documentary, Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.8 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From the late 19th to mid 20th centuries, the nation lived in fear of the polio virus. Often handicapping or paralyzing its victims, sometimes resulting in death, the disease was made all the more frightening by the fact that it preyed on young children. Generations of Americans were affected by this incurable illness until a brilliant young medical researcher, empowered by the coordinated efforts of public and private institutions, developed a miraculous vaccine. The expert knowledge and first-hand experiences of Walter Isaacson, David Oshinsky and Geoff Ward, assist Jon Meacham in telling a story which begins with debilitating fear and ends with everlasting hope. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It came in summer with rising temperatures, longer days, and fresh hopes.
0:18.0	A season that was supposed to be a dilic, especially for children, was transformed into a time
0:24.4	of terror, of illness, of paralysis, and all too often of death.
0:31.4	In New York, in the middle of July, 1916, amid a terrible outbreak in New York, New Jersey,
0:41.1	Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maryland, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, that would
0:47.2	have flicked 27,000 Americans and killed 7,000. The New York Times wrote of the real-life nightmare
0:54.3	of a father whose son was succumbing to polio meelitis, popularly called polio.
1:03.2	Unable to obtain a physician the Times reported, he put the boy into an automobile and drove to
1:08.6	the hospital. But the child died on the way, and the doctors would not receive the body.
1:16.2	He drove around Staten Island with the boy's body for hours, looking for someone who would receive it.
1:23.2	The Nation 2 was driving around in confusion and in grief and in panic, and would for decades to come.
1:34.2	I'm John Meacham, and this is Hope Through History.
1:44.2	Episode 3. The Polio Crisis
1:48.2	We realize we have to have a society in which on certain issues we're in the same boat.
1:54.2	I'd see kids in real chairs on crutches, the occasional empty desk of a child who had made it through the summer.
2:00.2	He was told by his mother that there were no problems. They couldn't be solved if he put his hand to the wheel.
2:05.2	He decided he should do something about it.
2:07.2	Those will begin the most successful private charity in American history, and that is the March of Dimes.
2:14.2	The fear of polio in the United States was a factor from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th centuries.
2:24.2	What time-life founder Henry Luce had called the American Century of power and glory of progress and prosperity
2:32.2	was blighted by an ambient, even existential anxiety that an invisible virus could strike at any time.
2:41.2	The fact that children were especially vulnerable exacerbated the enveloping sense of hopelessness.
	...

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