POLIO: AN AMERICAN STORY, by David Oshinsky, Oxford University Press, 342 pages, $30.
Writing in an easy, accessible style adopted by an increasing number of historians these days, David Oshinsky has, with "Polio: An American Story," produced a lively and important history of perhaps the most frightening American disease of the 20th century.
Employing meticulous research into the papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, Isabel Morgan and the other scientists who worked on a vaccine, Oshinsky sheds new light on a disease that grew into an American hygiene-based obsession.
Fallaciously called infantile paralysis, polio caused panic in many quarters because of its sudden onset, its tendency to paralyze and its permanent impact. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected president of the United States in 1932, became the most visible national symbol of polio, having been stricken in 1921. Oshinsky sheds much light on FDR's important role in publicizing polio's detriments and raising money for research to find a cure — even though he did everything he could to hide its ravaging effects on his own body.
The real conflict of this book, though — and the stuff of novels — is found in the nasty, personal competition between Salk and Sabin to beat each other to the draw. Each insulted the other, both privately and publicly, almost continuously for several years. Salk won out, but Sabin managed to displace him several years later — only to see, yet again, Salk's vaccine finally judged as superior.
Oshinsky points out that the Salk vaccine trials were the largest public-health experiment in American history, including more than a million schoolchildren.
Salk comes off as the people's hero, while Sabin looks more like the champion of the scientific world. Salk turned into a celebrity figure, who over time turned his back on research and started living a life resembling that of an entertainer. Following his scientific success, he even divorced his wife and married the former mistress of Pablo Picasso.
Even many years later, Salk is the one people tend to remember. Ironically, he was denied entrance into the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the only scientist studying polio to be thus overlooked, and he never received the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
The latter didn't seem to bother Salk, since he discovered that most people thought he had won it. In fact, the development of a vaccine is not likely to qualify a scientist for such a prize, unless it also involves an important discovery. Oshinsky argues that Nobel Prize-winner John Enders, another polio researcher, quite rightly earned the award because he found a breakthrough that was a necessity to the success of the Salk vaccine.
On the other hand, Oshinsky bends over backward to give just due to Isabel Morgan, the Johns Hopkins researcher who accomplished more sooner — and almost certainly would have beaten Salk to the prize had she not abandoned her scientific research in favor of marriage and family.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com