Polio: An American Story
by David Oshinsky
Summary
David Oshinsky's Polio: An American Story follows the disease that terrified mid century American parents every summer, when swimming pools closed and children were kept indoors on the strength of a fear that struck without warning and left some of its victims paralyzed or dead. Oshinsky opens with Franklin Roosevelt's own 1921 diagnosis, which shaped both his public image and the national campaign against the disease he helped found, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, better remembered by the name its fundraising drive gave it, the March of Dimes, which collected small donations from millions of ordinary Americans to fund research.
The book follows that research toward its two competing solutions, Jonas Salk's inactivated vaccine and Albert Sabin's live oral vaccine, and Oshinsky gives real attention to the personal rivalry between the two scientists, each convinced his own approach was correct and each impatient with the other's caution. He also follows less celebrated figures, including the scientist Isabel Morgan, whose promising research was cut short by family obligations, and traces how the urgency of a national field trial pushed vaccine testing, and the regulatory and legal frameworks built to manage its risks, into existence almost overnight.
Oshinsky writes accessible narrative history built for a general reader, moving between laboratory politics, fundraising campaigns and the lived fear of families who kept children away from crowds each summer, and reading the book means encountering a genuine public health triumph without losing sight of how frightening and uncertain it felt while still unfolding. It suits a reader interested in medicine and public health told through both science and the fear that funded it.
Historical Context & Significance
Oshinsky won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for History, ahead of finalists Jill Lepore's New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan and Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. The book also won the 2005 Herbert Hoover Book Award.
Oshinsky, who has taught at Rutgers, the University of Texas at Austin and New York University, where he directs the Division of Medical Humanities, built his career writing accessible narrative history on subjects including Joseph McCarthy and Parchman Farm prison before turning to polio. Reviewer Janet Greenlees, writing in Social History of Medicine, called it an extremely readable narrative, and the book remains a standard account of how fear, philanthropy and science combined to defeat a disease that once closed American summers.