"Unable to obtain a physician, he put the boy into an automobile and drove to the Smith Infirmary, but the child died on the way and the doctors at the hospital would not receive the body…. He drove around Staten Island with the boy’s body for hours looking for some one who would receive it.”
—New York Times, July 26, 1916

On a slow night on call at TBFCHITW, a bunch of interns and I sneaked into the basement to gawk at the old iron lung that stood outside the respiratory therapy department.

It was like a giant can of hairspray with the top popped off. It was covered in dust, with a few broken dials on top and rusted tubing emerging from the belly.

There was once a whole flotilla of these things at TBFCHITW. That's because there used to be a bunch of patients there who couldn't breathe outside of an iron lung. They had Infantile Paralysis, or Poliomyelitis, or Polio for short. A few recovered completely. Others would walk with a cane or crutches for the rest of their lives. Many died in the can.

Only folks a bit older than Flea can remember the Polio panics of the 50's. Flea knows personally only one person who had Polio as a child. In 1955, everybody knew somebody who had Polio. Public swimming pools and Summer camps were shut down and quarantines were ordered for homes with afflicted family members.

Today, thanks to the Sabin and Salk vaccines and to the hard work of thousands of volunteers, we are very close to eradication of Polio worldwide. Only a few hundred cases are reported each year. The only hurdles that remain are logistical ones, particularly resources and political will necessary to vaccinate remote populations in India and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The eradication of Polio will represent a public health triumph greater even than the victory over Smallpox, as the former is a water-borne virus, and the latter is spread person-to-person.

And then of course there are the anti-vaxers in this country, a group that includes the Amish community of Minnesota among others. If we lose the political will to pressure favored minorities such as the Amish, we may lose more children to the can. Except these days we have positive-pressure ventilators instead of iron lungs. They're some improvement, I guess.

Better not to get Polio at all.