Stephen E. Mawdsley, Selling Science: Polio and the Promise of Gamma Globulin

Abstract

The past few years have been good to those wishing to study the history of polio. The field has recently been enriched with many excellent works: Naomi Rogers’s latest book on Elizabeth Kenny has thrown light on the contested figure of polio treatment, her relationship with the American medical profession and her place in Cold War politics.1 Meanwhile, Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs’ exhaustive biography of Jonas Salk has taken us past the well-known story of hero scientist and his polio vaccine.2 Now, Stephen Mawdsley in his new book, Selling Science, guides us to a crucial, and as of yet entirely unexplored moment in the history of polio: the American trials and use of gamma globulin in polio prevention. Selling Science is set in the early 1950s, the years of severe polio outbreaks in the pre-vaccination era. With no vaccine at hand, Dr William McDowell Hammon, epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh began to build enthusiasm for the use of gamma globulin in preventing polio. A blood fraction, gamma globulin was known to be effective in measles and hepatitis control. Hammon pushed for ways to assess the efficacy of the serum in polio prevention and got the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) on board to assist him in his goal. Utilising carefully planned communication strategies, playing on Cold War tropes and selectively revealing information to journalists, Hammon and his associates lay the groundwork for the first large scale and open clinical trial on a healthy population. The trials that expanded from a pilot study in Utah to field trials in Texas, South Dakota and Iowa into a national experiment, brought to the fore public trust in science and scientists; questions of experimenting with placebo in an epidemic outbreak; segregation in a study on populations; and expectations from scientists, officials and the public in public health practice. In his analysis, Mawdsley follows these issues and places the gamma globulin trials in the context of Cold War propaganda, racial politics and post-war medical ethics.