But the malady lingers on
Carole Angier
SUMMER PLAGUE by Tony Gould Yale, £19.95, pp. 366 As Tony Gould says in his opening line, polio is now (or seems now) a conquered, forgotten disease in Europe. But in other parts of the world (mostly in India, China and West Africa) there are still up to a million cases a year. In India alone there are as many as 12 million affected survivors, in the US over half a million. And now it seems that the effects may not end with the degree of paralysis that remains after the first five years of rehabilitation. It seems now, 40 to 50 years after the great epidemics in the West, that there may be such a thing as 'post-polio syndrome', in which — as is the way of the world — from those who have not, still more will be taken.
The last histories of polio were written in the Sixties and Seventies; they were scientific and political overviews, leaving the personal triumphs and tragedies to biographies of the main players (Salk and Sabin, FDR) and to the autobiographies of `polios' (as victims are called, in a painful but profound identification with their dis- ease.) It is time for a new history, which Combines the almost-forgotten facts with the new fears, and the science and politics with the amazing and appalling personal stories. That is what Tony Gould has given us, both rigorously and movingly, in A Summer Plague. There is an element of morbid curiosity which glues you to this book — the fatal attraction of the crowd to the street acci- dent, of the worried well to the Medical .Encyclopaedia. And polio was — is — just about the worst thing you can think of: it attacks (mostly) children; it paralyses you and makes you unable to breathe; and it does it all so fast, in a matter of hours, so that one of its early names was Paralysis of the Morning, 'after the way in which a child goes to bed apparently healthy, wakes feverish in the night and then is unable to get up in the morning'.
I didn't know this; I didn't know most of the worst things I do now about polio. For example, what it feels like to be put in an iron lung (the best — ie. the worst description of this is Tony Gould's own, from his own polio in 1959); or how in New York in 1916 poor children were forcibly removed from their parents, whilst rich ones were rushed out of the city by theirs — only to be turned back by neighbouring towns, like some ghastly time-travel return to the Middle Ages. I didn't know about rocking beds and - frog breathing and trachiotomies (called 'cutting throats' by the splendid Dr Geoffrey Spencer of St Thomas's) — all ways in which people who can't breathe are helped to; I didn't know that some people (like Paul Bates in Eng- land or Frederick Snite and Tom Rogers in America) can never breathe without help again, and spend the rest of their lives in iron lungs, or attached to respirators (but marry, like Rogers, have children, like Snite.) Almost worse, because more imag- inable, I didn't know about 'upside down' polios (like Lawrence Becker in America or Maureen O'Sullivan and Simon Parritt in England): people who regain the use of their legs but not of their arms, so that they may look more able, but cannot hold the people they love, or catch themselves if they fall.
Some of these stories (especially in Part II of A Summer Plague, which is wholly dedicated to them) are almost unbearable to read. And yet, at the same time, not at all. Because they almost all say what Tony Gould himself says, in his autobiographical coda: that polio 'opened more doors than it closed'; that it forced them to do their best, to be more patient and more open than they might have been if they had remained `normal'. At the same time, therefore, our morbid fascination doesn't seem to be mor- bid any more. Tovead about others' suffer- ing — at least when it is as well written about as it is here — is not to feel safe, and gloat; but to experience it imaginatively ourselves, and to realise that we too must do our best, open rather than close doors, even though — which makes it so much harder — we are not forced to.
Which leaves, I see, the whole of the `normal' polio story — the science and the politics, the normal wars: between ortho- dox and unorthodox treatments (the medi- cal establishment versus Sister Kenny); between killed and live vaccine (Salk versus Sabin, and others now forgotten but remembered here.) This too is dramatic, as wars and races always are; and it too is well told — the complex science made clear, the complex history leavened with personal portraits of the heroes and villains, winners and losers of the polio story.
Unsurprisingly, however — given my previous remarks — this 'normal' story is, by contrast, pretty unedifying. To fight for your life and dignity is one thing; to fight for fame and fortune, even in a good cause, is another. And yet, by definition (and thank heaven) this is the normal and more common lot. There are, therefore, also many lessons here. Not least that we (ie. I) may be wrong to feel that modern medicine is as much a curse as a blessing, for which we may even need the balance of euthanasia. It is hard to go on thinking that after reading Tony Gould's account of the extraordinary wedding (on a Mississippi gambling-boat) of 58-year-old Tom Rogers, `breathing-impaired quadriplegic'; or the account by Ian Drury, pop star and polio survivor, with only one working leg. One day someone, forgetting this, says, `I'd sooner be dead than lose a leg.' What he didn't know,' says Drury (a year and a half in hospital at the age of seven), 'is that he wouldn't sooner be dead.'
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