3. Polio Pandemic
One of the greatest fears of American parents in the 1950s was Polio. Visiting towns every summer like a scourge, countless American children were falling ill from the disease with many becoming permanently paralyzed or, in the worst case aside from death, being bound to iron lungs for artificial respiration for the rest of their lives. It was an extra element of cruelty that the disease always struck over the summer in what should have been a happy, carefree time for children.
Before Jonas Salk’s vaccine was created in 1955, Polio was an ever-present scourge. In 1952, over 60,000 children were infected with the disease with over 3,000 dying. For lucky children, the condition was like a mild case of the flu. For the unlucky, paralysis or post-polio syndrome were a result. Severe cases were so prevalent that hospitals began having to construct special iron lung and Polio wings to care for the most severely affected.
There are few things sadder than seeing the old photos of the iron lung hospital wings. Countless rows of massive machines sit with tiny children’s heads sticking out. Negative pressure ventilators, as iron lungs are properly called, were invented to force a paralyzed patient’s lungs to breathe through pressure changes within the machine. While artificial respirators still exist, they are much smaller machines than the original iron lungs that condemned children to years of total inactivity.