American Ingenuity Beat the Polio Outbreak

So Why Risk Letting It Return?

Polio vaccine delivered by sugar cube; CC license, Wellcome Collection

When Paul woke up, he couldn’t move. He couldn’t talk; he could scarcely breath. A tent surrounded him, too foggy to see through. The humidity was supposed to help, but in the damp darkness he felt only fear. Then came the nurse. She took the tent away, but revealed something even more horrific. In a scene that predates the Matrix movie by fifty-odd years, Paul looked out into a sea of metal cases, each containing a human being, each plugged in to the machinery. Only their heads poked through the apparatus, floating and seemingly disembodied. Rows and rows, as if without end, of children just like Paul.

An adult-sized iron lung, rectangle rather than canister model, with a man being loaded inside. A nurse stands at his head and a doctor monitors the compressor. CC license Wellcome Collection.

These memories were recorded for an article in 2020, just as Covid began to ravage the US population. Paul Alexander didn’t suffer from Covid, however; the then-74-year-old instead described the illness that forever changed his life: polio, or poliomyelitis. He’d contracted the disease in 1952 — and he still used his iron lung, the heavy contraption he’d awoken in all those years ago. In fact, he used it until the day he died, on March 11, 2024.