A Summer Plague: Polio and its Survivors

Tony Gould Yale University Press £19.95, pp 384 ISBN 0 300 06292 3

Tony Gould and I started our adult lives with quite a lot in common. He is nine years younger but we both polio at the age of about 20. We both experienced breathing problems and a spell in a respirator; he can walk, where I failed. We adapted well to our problems and were successful in our chosen careers; we both married and raised families. Gould chose the life of scholarship while I chose to train as a doctor.

A Summer Plague is well researched and referenced and provides a comprehensive history of the polio epidemics of the first five r six decades of this century and the controversies surrounding treatment, which ranged from the warm packs and exercise propounded by sister Kenny and the Hubbard hydrotherapy tank to the prolonged torture of immobilisation in plaster casts and even massage with peanut oil. That Franklin Roosevelt was a victim secured funding and impetus for research in the United States. It required the death of Jeff Hall, an international footballer, to fire enthusiasm for vaccination in Britain as late as 1958. The ultimate conquest of the disease by Salk and Sabin, and the shameful rivalry between them, is described with great clarity and without a single "titre." In the West the history of polio is, nevertheless, the history of an "old disease" like tuberculosis or smallpox.

In the second half of the book Gould also traces the lives of several victims and their struggle to "compete on level terms" and he tells his own story briefly. I learnt a lot about polio because, odd though this may seem, I have been too busy over the past 45 years to study the disease that put me in a wheelchair for the whole of my career.

The word "survivors" in the title raised hopes that I might find some answers to the great question that hangs over "OPs" (Old Polios): What about this "Post-polio syndrome"? Through no fault of Gould this part of the story is thin because only recently have substantial numbers of survivors of the epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s reached the age at which they develop it, and they do not seem to have attracted much research. Who wants to spend time researching the end results of an extinct disease, and where would the funds come from? We find a long list of possibilities - excessive exercise of damaged muscles, a form of motor neurone disease, reactivation of a persistent virus, or premature aging of reinnervated muscle fibres. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what to do about what has become such a painful reality for us OPs when we become OAPs.

Gould is not a doctor and his book is all the better for it. He asks the right questions and he challenges the profession to answer them.

BILL INMAN Southampton