Gareth Williams, Paralysed with Fear: The Story of Polio

Abstract

Following the 1971 publication of John R. Paul's seminal work, A History of Poliomyelitis, few writers have attempted to craft a competing macro-history of polio. Rising to the challenge, Gareth Williams in Paralysed with Fear provides a fresh biopic of polio and charts its metamorphosis from an unknown clinical entity in the eighteenth century to a genomic curio in the post-vaccine twenty-first century. Williams, a physician and former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Bristol, has an accomplished publishing record. Although he has devoted most of his energies to textbooks, he has also written expansive histories of disease, including an earlier monograph, entitled Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox. By drawing on historical medical journals, interviews and secondary literature, Williams argues that unlocking the mystery of polio was not one of steady progress, but a rambling transnational journey informed by competing philosophies and personal politics blended with scientific setbacks and successes. The book is organised chronologically around thematic chapters that present important developments in the discovery, treatment and control of polio. To ground his analysis, Williams first examines the long road to identify the disease. He discovers that paralytic polio, a relatively rare affliction compared to other illnesses, was ‘slow to impress medical men’ (p. 4). Although the disease received greater attention once it emerged in epidemic form, divisions between the miasmtists and the germ theorists initially undermined advancements in knowledge. Meanwhile, polio treatment remained a prisoner of orthodoxy with patients subjected to limb immobilisation. Turning to twentieth-century America, Williams describes how the 1916 New York City epidemic forged momentum to systematically fight polio; however, it was not until the establishment of national health philanthropies that adequate funding was made available to improve medical care and research programmes. The author analyses the politically charged terrain of science in appraising the missteps of Park, Brodie and Kolmer in the 1930s, as well as the subsequent abuses and achievements of Salk, Sabin, Koprowski and Cox in the 1950s and 1960s. Through this foray, Williams reveals the surprising circumstances that carried some interventions forward, while relegating others to the dustbin.