Oshinsky, David. Polio—An American Story. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 6.5 x 9.5. 342 pgs. 30 photographs. Cloth 13: 978-0-19-515924-4. $30.

Reviewed by Roger Daniels, University of Cincinnati

Produced and marketed to benefit from the fiftieth anniversary of the April 12, 1955 announcement of the success of the 1954 trials of the Salk vaccine, Polio—An American Story is a deftly written and intelligently researched social history of the struggle to develop a cure for poliomyelitis. Focusing on doctors rather than patients, it relates a generally known story which had been teased out by Saul Benison and other historians of medicine in the decades after the climactic breakthrough. Oshinsky's contribution—not a small thing—has been to create a readable narrative which can be utilized by classroom teachers and easily grasped by undergraduates.

It is a complex story. Oshinsky opens a brief introduction with an account of a 1949 outbreak of polio in San Angelo, a west Texas city of 50,000—420 cases, 28 deaths and 84 survivors permanently paralyzed—and then lays out the major themes of his book—the rivalries among competing scientists, the role of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and the place of polio research in the development of American medicine. Here and later, it seems to me, he tends to overstate the significance of the polio story. For example, In arguing that "the genius of the National Foundation lay in its ability to single out polio for special attention, making it seem more ominous and more curable than other diseases" (p. 5), he ignores the prior use of such techniques by organizations devoted to the eradication of tuberculosis and cancer, particularly breast cancer.

Fast paced chapters cover the earliest epidemics and the beginnings of large-scale medical philanthropy: Franklin Roosevelt's polio experience, his establishment of the treatment center at Warm Springs, the fund-raising presidential birthday balls starting in 1934, which morph into the March of Dimes, and the establishment of the National Foundation in 1938 are all treated in the first 91 pages. Occasionally Oshinsky makes claims that cannot be supported, writing that Roosevelt "never [gave] up his dream of walking." (p. 8)

Most of the rest of the book is concerned with the search for a polio vaccine, and the focus switches to Jonas Salk and, to a lesser degree, to his archrival Albert Sabin. There are other ways of telling this story. A history of science approach might feature the work of John Franklin Enders (1897-1985), the Harvard virologist whose basic work, between 1939 and 1949, led to cultivation of the polio virus in cell culture using nonnervous tissue for which he, Frederick C. Robbins, and Thomas H. Weller won the only Nobel Prize ever awarded for polio research in 1954. Without that basic discovery it would not have been possible for Salk to produce his killed virus vaccine or for Sabin to produce the live virus vaccine. Another approach would be to tell the story from the point of view of the National Foundation. Oshinsky is aware of these approaches, and provides basic information about each, but he emphasizes the celebrity approach to the history of science, mimicking American culture. Henry Luce's Time, as he points out, listed Salk and no other polio researcher among its top 100 scientists of the 20th century and put him, along with Einstein and Freud, on its cover.

Oshinsky is not a hero worshiper. His Salk is, at best, a flawed hero, and his Sabin something less than that. A student of McCarthyism, he has gotten access to Salk's FBI file and discovered that an investigation of him just as he was beginning to get important National Foundation grants almost resulted in his being declared disloyal. The file describes some left-wing political activity, including membership in a committee that supported Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential bid and efforts to force Ann Arbor barbers to cut the hair of African Americans. Oshinsky reports that Salk thereafter eschewed controversial causes and quotes a colleague who says that he refused even to sign a petition protesting the lynching of Emmet Till. After he became a celebrity conservatives courted him. A memo from Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower's major domo, suggested that a White House visit by Salk could show that his boss "is just as interested as Franklin D. Roosevelt in polio." (p. 215) All of this—and more—is a good read. It does not, however, advance significantly our knowledge about the organization of medical research in the middle decades of the twentieth century.