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Polio has been around since ancient times. A 3,500 year old ancient Egyptian stele depicts a priest with the telltale paralysis, withering of his leg and foot. Reports of polio dot the pages of medical journals here and there starting in the 18th century. But really, it was a very quiet disease for most of history, affecting few people and raising little alarm. It wasn’t until the 20th century that polio began to appear among the masses, terrifying epidemics, a mysterious disease that seemed to target children out of nowhere, paralyzing them, killing them. No one knew how it spread. No one knew how to treat it. No one knew how to stop it. They quarantined. They avoided swimming pools and water fountains. They lived in fear. But the strange thing was, these polio epidemics were only happening in developed countries in Europe and North America, countries that had recently gone to great lengths to ensure improved hygiene and sanitation. Good hygiene, cleanliness, was supposed to prevent the spread of disease. How had it backfired so horrifically with polio? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. We, every single one of us, have lived through a global pandemic which is wild. That’s insane. Covid was a really bizarre blip that we did our best to normalize and bounce back from. I think people in the future who didn’t live through it will look back on that history like “whoa, what a crazy thing. I can’t believe that happened. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be alive back then.” But for us it was just life. We just did it. We made due. It was what it was. And I think it’s like that with a lot of history. I always try to remember that. Like, not to downplay any tragic events or anything, but when we look at the world wars, or the great depression, or any of these times that came before us, they’re almost condensed into this little compressed pocket of horror where we can’t even imagine how people got through it. But, at the time, it just was what it was. People made due as best they could. I mean, that doesn’t apply to all history, some of it was worse than we can even conceive but, I don’t know, I’m rambling. Hopefully that halfway made sense. It’s different when you're in it, when you’re living it. It’s more digestible than it seems to people looking back from the future. Is what I’m trying to say.
I am just so incredibly thankful that Covid mostly left kids alone. You know. It was super scary for elderly people or immunocompromised people and many lives were lost and that’s very tragic but, for the most part, the kids came out alright and thank God for that. I was pregnant and had a one year old at the start of Covid. If it had been ravaging children, I can’t even imagine the fear. But that was the reality for those who lived through the polio epidemics of the early 20th century. Poliomyelitis AKA polio is a virus that mostly affects children between 6 months and 4 years old. It messes with the nerves in the spinal cord and brain stem and can lead to irreversible paralysis and also death if the paralysis causes you to be unable to breathe. Kids would literally go to bed fine and wake up paralyzed the next morning. Can you imagine?
We’ll get more into the disease itself soon, but first let’s look at some of the earliest evidence of the existence of polio. Because it existed, it was a thing, for at least thousands of years. It just wasn’t really a problem. It was rare enough to not be a problem. Ancient Egyptian paintings and carvings show people with paralyzed, withered limbs and children walking with canes. The mummified body of the pharoah Siptah is clear evidence that he experienced withering of his right leg and foot, likely caused by polio. Some theorize that the Roman Emperor Claudius had polio as a child which caused him to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. And then nothing really, no reports until the 1700s, but that can be said of most things between the fall of the Roman empire and the age of enlightenment. In 1773, when Sir Walter Scott was two years old, he was said to have a quote “severe teething fever which deprived him of the power of his right leg,” end quote. Scott would go on to become a famous novelist, poet and historian but he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life. In 1789, a London pediatrician named Michael Underwood published the first clear description of polio in a medical textbook. By the early 1800s a handful of people affected by polio were being reported in medical literature but that is it like, for all of time, those are the only reports, like 5 reports, and a lot are just theorized to be polio, not even confirmed. On the other hand, there were diseases like smallpox just destroying people throughout history, decimating whole populations. So it’s clear that, while polio existed, it's been endemic for millennia, it was not really messing with people until the 1800s a little bit and then absolutely exploded in the 1900s. It follows an opposite pattern to most diseases, like smallpox which we eventually figured out and eradicated. Smallpox was like bad, bad, bad, really bad, better, better, better, gone. Right? With increased knowledge about germs and how diseases spread, we figured out how to avoid it. But with polio it was more like fine, fine, fine, still fine, kind of bad, bad, worse, worse, worse. With increased knowledge about germs and how diseases spread, we actually saw polio get worse and transform from a rarely bothersome disease into recurring deadly epidemics.
And this transformation ironically coincides with improvements in hygiene and sanitation. We know this because the epidemics only started happening, around the turn of the 20th century, in developed countries in Europe and North America. These were places that had just, over the last few decades, worked on improving sanitation with sewers and clean drinking water and washing hands because now we know about germs and how diseases spread. But ironically, this is actually what made polio a problem. So here’s the thing, if a very young child, like a baby gets polio, they are not likely to develop severe symptoms. They are not likely to experience paralysis. And once they’ve had it, they’re good. They’re immune to it now. They won’t get it again. So health experts believe that, throughout time, babies were regularly being exposed to polio just through how nasty everything was. Because polio virus can spread through droplets from sneezing and coughing but it mostly spreads through feces, poop. There are no sanitary sewers, they’re just tossing the poop in the street and it’s ending up in the water supply and people are drinking poop water and, if they’re even washing their hands at all, they’re washing them in poop water. There’s poop everywhere. Everyone is covered in poop for a lot of history. I wish I was kidding. I’m not. And so babies are constantly being exposed to polio through all the nastiness and they’re getting it but it's not very bad, mild symptoms, they recover, they’re good. They can’t get polio again. And so it wasn’t showing up in older children or adults, when symptoms would be much worse, because they all already had it when they were babies. It was like a natural vaccine. The poop was the vaccine. And if you look at the handful of historical cases I mentioned, the timing of them makes sense. Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, these were advanced civilizations with decent sanitation, considering. The Romans had a sewer system that was fairly similar to modern sewers. And then, we don’t really see polio causing problems again until the late 1700s. And, let’s be honest, between ancient Rome and the 1700s, people are basically wallowing in poop. Polio causes problems when civilization is the cleanest because the babies are not being exposed. They don’t develop immunity and then they get it later and it’s way worse. Like I said, babies with polio do not usually have severe symptoms. Older kids, like 5 to 9 are much more likely to experience paralysis, 1 in 1,000 cases. And adults are way way more likely to experience paralysis, 1 in 75 adult polio cases will become paralyzed.
So polio is happening forever but it’s not a problem. The babies are just getting it and recovering and gaining immunity. Then, it all starts. The first report of multiple polio cases in one area comes from Louisiana in 1841. In 1868, there are 14 cases in Oslo, Norway. 1881, 13 cases in northern Sweden. And at this point, people start to wonder if polio, which was called infantile paralysis back then, might actually be contagious. It was so sporadic before now, that it wasn’t considered to be a contagious disease because it didn’t really spread. One random, unfortunate guy got it and that was it. But now we’re seeing groups of people getting polio for the first time really and the question of contagion arises. In 1893 there are 26 cases reported in Boston. The next year, 1894, the first official epidemic is recorded in Vermont - 132 cases including 18 deaths, several of them adults. It’s getting real. And it’s hard to ignore that fact at this point that polio is contagious. And what’s terrifying about that is they had no idea how it was spreading. Was it in the water like cholera? Was it coming from an insect? Mosquitos? Flies? How was it transmitted? They had no idea.
After that first baby epidemic in Vermont, the numbers just really started to explode. 1,031 cases in Sweden in 1905. 2,500 cases in New York City in 1907. In 1916, there were 27,363 cases in the US and 7,130 deaths. 2,000 of those deaths were in New York City alone. So let’s just look at the numbers for a sec. 27,000 some cases and 7,000 some deaths. That’s roughly a fourth. As in one out of every four people with polio died that year. By comparison, the death rate for Covid, according to the CDC, was 61 out of 100,000. So polio was comparatively much more deadly.
An article in the Yale Medicine Magazine provides a bit more detail about that 1916 outbreak stating quote “The story begins in June 1916, with a health crisis in Pigtown, a densely populated immigrant neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. Frightened Italian parents had approached local doctors and priests, according to news accounts, “complaining that their child could not hold a bottle or that the leg seemed limp.” When the first deaths followed a few days later, health department investigators rushed to Pigtown for a house-to-house inspection. All signs pointed to a disease known as infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis (soon shortened to “polio” by the newspapers to save headline space). As it spread from Brooklyn, communities across the Northeast closed their doors to outsiders, using heavily armed policemen to patrol the train stations and the roads… There had been minor polio outbreaks in previous years, but nothing like this.
Starting with that explosion of cases in 1916, the names and addresses of people with confirmed polio cases were published in the newspaper daily. A quarantine sign would be placed in the window of their houses and the whole family would be forced to quarantine. There was widespread panic, especially in the cities. People fled the cities and headed to less populated rural areas. Public gatherings were canceled, we know all about that. People were warned to avoid swimming pools and beaches. The water seemed to have something to do with it. Because these outbreaks were mostly happening in the summer when people were going swimming. Starting in 1916, there was a polio epidemic every summer in at least one part of the country peaking in the 1940s and 50s. And I guess that makes sense on account of the poop? I mean is there poop in swimming pools? Do I? I don’t even wanna know. But polio outbreaks were very much a summer thing.
The Yale article says quote “By mid-century, polio had become the nation’s most feared disease. And with good reason. It hit without warning. It killed some victims and marked others for life, leaving behind vivid reminders for all to see: wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces and deformed limbs. In 1921, it paralyzed 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, robust and athletic, with a long pedigree and a cherished family name. If a man like Roosevelt could be stricken, then no one was immune,” end quote. FDR would go on, of course, to become US president from 1933 until his death in 1945, the longest serving US president, that’s 12 years. Term limits weren’t established until 1951. And the dude was, I mean he was one of the greats. President during World War II, helped defeat Hitler, all from a wheelchair which he mostly hid from the public. But he was a polio victim and paralyzed from the waist down because of it.
But, that same article is sure to point out quote “In truth, polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, not even at its height in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ten times as many children would be killed in accidents in these years, and three times as many would die of cancer,” end quote. But the fear came from the dramatic jump in cases from year to year, doubling and doubling again. Also, the ages of victims was rising. After World War II, a quarter of all polio victims were older than 10. And of course we know older victims are much more likely to become paralyzed and to suffer from bulbar polio which immobilizes breathing muscles leading to suffocation and death. So, it’s not like everywhere. It’s not like Covid in that way. The numbers are relatively low, peaking at 37 cases for every 100,000 people. It’s still not very widespread but it is really freaking scary. One of the worst polio outbreaks actually, some North Carolina history for my NC folks, happened in Hickory, North Carolina in 1944.
They know so little about it, they really don’t know how to treat it at first. They don’t know how to treat these people, who are mostly children, to save them. And a lot of the stuff that they’re trying is actually causing more harm than good. One remedy suggestion published in A Monograph on the Epidemic of Poliomyelitis (Infantile Paralysis) in New York City in 1916 reads quote “Give oxygen through the lower extremities, by positive electricity. Frequent baths using almond meal, or oxidizing the water. Applications of poultices of Roman chamomile, slippery elm, arnica, mustard, cantharis, amygdalae dulcis oil, and of special merit, spikenard oil and Xanthoxolinum. Internally use caffeine, Fl. Kola, dry muriate of quinine, elixir of cinchone, radium water, chloride of gold, liquor calcis and wine of pepsin,” end quote. So yeah, they have no idea what they’re doing. Another thing they did early on along with the radium water and spikenard oil, I suppose, was to put people in braces and like full body casts so that they couldn’t use their muscles at all. Because they believed that moving would make the paralysis and deformity worse. But this led to muscle atrophy which actually ended up making the paralysis and deformity worse so it kind of had the opposite effect they were going for. It was actually a woman, Sister Elizabeth Kenny who came up with the first effective treatment for polio when all these men who dominated the medical profession failed horribly with their chloride of gold. Kenny was a nurse from Queensland, Australia who gained experience treating polio patients there between 1928 and 1940 and developed a form of therapy that would come to be called the Kenny regimen. Instead of immobilizing people for months in body casts and letting their remaining healthy muscles wither away, she used exercise and movement to strengthen the unaffected, healthy muscles. She also applied moist hot packs to prevent muscle spasms and relieve pain. She eventually relocated to the US and settled in Minnesota where she established the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute for polio victims. Her method, the Kenny Regimen soon became the official treatment regimen for polio and it is still used to this day.
Another breakthrough lifesaving treatment came with the invention of the iron lung. An iron lung, if you’ve never seen one is like a big metal tube that you lay inside of and it uses pressure to compress and expand your lungs for you. And this is how they were able to keep people alive who had that bulbar form of polio where their breathing muscles became paralyzed. It was invented by some guys at Harvard University and first tested at a children’s hospital in Boston in 1928. The first version of it used an electric motor and vacuum cleaners, yes vacuum cleaners, to increase and decrease the pressure, mimicking natural breathing, the rising and the falling of the chest as the lungs expand and contract. This design was eventually improved by attaching a bellows directly to the machine. So a bellows is like what you use to squirt air, squirt? I don’t know if that’s the right word, on a fire to make a fire bigger. It’s like an air pump basically. Iron lungs saved many lives during polio epidemics, but these things were super expensive. In 1930, an iron lung machine cost around $1,500 which doesn’t seem like that much but that was also the average price of a house at that time. Can you imagine buying a whole house for $1,500? I don’t even want to talk about how much houses cost right now. So an iron lung cost as much as a house in 1930. They were expensive to buy and they were expensive to run because it was nonstop indefinitely. Patients spent months, years, and sometimes the rest of their whole lives in iron lungs. Because they couldn’t breath without it and it was the only thing keeping them alive long term.
Paul Alexander who died just a few months ago actually at the age of 78 held the world record for living the longest in an iron lung - 70 years. 70 years he spent in an iron lung. And if you’ve never seen an iron lung, google a picture real quick and then imagine living in that for 70 years. Actually, if you google iron lung, you’ll also see Paul. He’s in like half the pictures. Paul came down with polio when he was 6 years old and ended up in an iron lung because of respiratory failure due to paralysis of the muscles that control breathing. He also became a quadriplegic meaning all four limbs were paralyzed. He spent some time in the hospital, he was from Texas, and then they were basically like, “yeah, it’s not looking good, we don’t think he’s going to make it.” But his parents were like “move, we got this,” and then took him home with the iron lung and just continued to live their lives with their kid in an iron lung now. He eventually taught himself a glossopharyngeal breathing technique which is also called frog breathing and this allowed him to be out of the iron lung for short periods of time. But he would eventually have to get back in it in order to get enough oxygen. And this guy, I mean he blew the doctors’ expectations out of the water. He grew up, he went to college, he went to law school. He became a lawyer and started practicing law in downtown Dallas. A BBC article about him by Catherine Snowden says quote “He had to deal with the surprise of clients on entering his office and seeing him in his iron lung,” end quote. His brother Philip is quoted in the article saying quote “It's not an easy thing to see, just a head sticking out. People immediately go into shock. I saw that happen a lot,” end quote. Wild. And yet he did it. He was a practicing lawyer. He lived alone for much of his adult life somehow as a quadriplegic in an iron lung. And he made the most of it. He lived the fullest life he could.
Eventually iron lungs were replaced with positive pressure ventilators which is like a mask that you hold over your face and it forces air into your lungs. And I’m unfortunately familiar with this because my newborn needed one of these for a bit when he was born 4 weeks early. Just for like an hour or so then he was good. They stopped making iron lungs in the 70s. So when Paul’s iron lung started leaking air in 2015 and couldn’t maintain pressure anymore, he had a really hard time replacing it. He was eventually able to find a replacement that came broken from a building clearance sale and had to be repaired with random parts and odds and ends but it worked and they got him in it before he suffocated, you know, because it was a race against time. The article says he was starting to turn blue by the time they got the thing working. So why did Paul keep using an iron lung more than 50 years after they became obsolete? Habit? I don’t know, he just preferred it to the ventilator I guess. Dr. Patrick Murphy, the clinical lead consultant at the respiratory unit at St. Thomas Hospital in London says in that BBC article quote “Positive pressure respirators can make the patient feel like they have their head stuck out of the car window. Not everyone likes that sensation,” end quote.
Because of the round the clock care needed by polio patients who were undergoing the Kenny Regimen with the hot pack therapy and many of them in iron lungs, victims of polio were typically hospitalized for long periods of time. And a lot of these patients were children. And that’s hard. It’s hard to hospitalize children for days on end, away from their parents, alone, indoors, scared, sick. It’s a terrible situation. But in 1948, a retired school teacher in California named Eleanor Abbott found a way to help at least a little bit. She herself had been diagnosed with polio and was a patient at a hospital in San Diego surrounded by children who also had polio. And, as any teacher would, she saw that the children needed a distraction, something to keep them busy. So she invented a board game that I’m sure you’re familiar with - Candy Land. That’s right, Candy Land was invented in a polio hospital as a way of entertaining young patients and taking their minds off of things. Abbott eventually pitched the game to toy manufacturer Milton Bradley and soon it was their best selling board game. It took off during the baby boom that followed World War II because kids, even very young kids, as young as 3, could play Candy Land on their own without an adult. You don’t have to be able to read or count and so it was something they could do independently. And that was very appealing to all of these baby boomer parents so Candy Land flew off the shelves. It was a smash hit. And I love this story because I create educational materials for a living and I’ve come up with a lot of board games, mostly math board games, so I really relate to Eleanor Abbott seeing this need with her teacher senses tingling and finding a way to meet it. This really resonates with me.
So what happened? Because polio isn’t obviously this big scary problem today like it was in the first half of the 20th century, thank god. Well, early on, the nerds launched into action to try to develop a vaccine for polio. Vaccines for smallpox and rabies had already been highly effective so they knew it was possible. But it wasn’t going to be easy. According to the Yale Medical Magazine article quote “Three major problems had to be solved. First, researchers would have to determine how many different types of poliovirus there were. Second, they would have to develop a safe and steady supply of each virus type for use in a vaccine. Third, they would have to discover the true pathogenesis of polio—its route to the central nervous system—in order to fix the exact time and place for the vaccine to do its work,” end quote. So this was a lot of work and it would take a lot of money. That’s where the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, better known as the March of Dimes, came into play. The March of Dimes revolutionized the way charities raised money through little bits from the masses, dimes right, as opposed to lump sums from a few wealthy donors. We see this all the time now whenever you're asked if you want to round up when you’re checking out at a store to benefit some charity or another, the Salvation army Santa Claus at Christmas time. The March of Dimes was the first to do this and it was for polio, in order to fund research for the polio vaccine. Revolutionary.
So first they have to figure out how many different strains of polio there are. Because if there’s a bunch of different strains, this is going to be hard to pull off. Luckily, they find only 3. So that’s good. That’s manageable. They harvest polio virus that’s safe and effective to use in a vaccine and they start growing it in test tubes which is new. This had typically been done in the brain or spinal cord of a monkey. But they’re able to grow the virus in test tubes which is way safer and less likely to become contaminated. So that’s all going swimmingly. But problem number 3 remains. They do not know how polio gets to the brain stem of its victims where it’s able to mess with nerves and cause paralysis. They’re pretty sure it enters the body through the mouth and then works its way down to the digestive tract. Because we know it ends up in poop so it has to be in the digestive tract. But they haven’t found any trace of it in the bloodstream of victims. So how is it getting to the brain, the central nervous system if not through blood? They needed to figure this out in order to make a working vaccine and they were puzzled. And children were dying.
It would be yet another woman in an overwhelmingly male dominated career who would finally solve that problem. Dorothy Horstmann, born in 1911, always wanted to be a doctor. She once said quote “it never crossed my mind that this was in any way unusual for women… It was quite natural,” end quote. She got her medical degree from the University of California and began applying for jobs as a doctor in 1941. She applied at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville where the chief of medicine, Dr. Hugh Morgan, was known to only hire men and was told no, of course. 6 months later, Dr. Morgan reached back asking if “Dr. Horstmann” was still interested in the position. She was like “yeah, def,” and took the job. Turns out, Morgan had forgotten that Dorothy Horstmann was a woman. He had gone back through applicants and was like “hmm, this guy looks great, why did I turn him down? What was I thinking” offered the job, she accepted, and then was like “wait! What? No!” Dorothy reported finding out from his secretary that he quote “all but went into shock [when he realized]. … But we became friends, and I had a very good year there,” end quote. So she was up against some serious gender discrimination. But that did not stop her. Girl was born to be a doctor.
Next she applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University where she recalls that the dean quote “went on to tell me how the last woman he had on the house staff did something awful,” end quote. She replied quote “if a woman on the house staff did not live up to expectations it was remembered for the next 50 years, but if the person was a man, it was forgotten by the next year,” end quote. She was ultimately accepted at Yale and joined the polio unit where she proceeded to show every single body up. Because they had all been searching in vain, trying to figure out how the poliovirus made its way from the digestive tract to the brain if not through the bloodstream. Dorothy starts looking at blood samples from polio patients during a 1943 outbreak in New Haven, Connecticut. Out of 111 blood samples, only one contained poliovirus. So all these people had polio but it was only present in one person’s blood, a little girl with some minor neck pain. Dorothy starts to theorize that poliovirus was only in the bloodstream for a short period of time before the person came down with actual polio symptoms. And to test this, she starts experimenting with monkeys. She feeds them poliovirus and then starts immediately testing their blood. According to the Yale article quote “The results were dramatic. Poliovirus was detected within days of the feedings. Why had so many others failed to discover this? The answer was deceptively simple: they had waited too long before looking. Horstmann’s discovery, published in 1952, would pave the way for both the Salk killed-virus polio vaccine and the Sabin live-virus polio vaccine,” end quote. With this knowledge discovered by a woman, Dr. Dorothy Horstmann, they are able to create an effective polio vaccine to put a stop to the madness.
In a letter to Dorothy Horstmann in 1953, Yale’s distinguished historian of medicine John F. Fulton wrote quote “This disclosure is as exciting as anything that has happened in the Yale Medical School since I first came here in 1930 and is a tremendous credit to your industry and scientific imagination. … It is also medical history,” end quote. Just goes to show, never underestimate a woman in a male dominated field. She has to work 10 times as hard, be 10 times smarter, 10 times better than him to even be there. Dorothy Horstmann would go on to become the first female professor of medicine at Yale, the first woman at Yale to hold an endowed chair which is like a distinguished position that has something to do with funding. She is also the only woman with a portrait hanging in the Yale School of Medicine gallery of luminaries among a sea of men. She died in 2001.
Dorothy Horstmann’s discovery made the polio vaccine possible. And with the vaccine, polio was all but eradicated. After the vaccine was introduced, worldwide polio cases fell by 99%. The United States has not seen a wild polio case since 1979. But it’s still out there. According to Encyclopedia Britannica quote “ongoing vaccination campaigns led to eradication from nearly all countries worldwide by 2022; the only remaining countries affected by endemic polio [are] Afghanistan and Pakistan,” end quote. So maybe don’t go to those countries if you’re kids aren’t vaccinated and, I mean, other reasons too.
Another interesting side effect of the polio era was improvements in rights for people with disabilities. Thousands of polio survivors were going home from hospitals with partial or full paralysis and trying to resume their normal lives. But life wasn’t set up for people with disabilities. The world wasn’t accessible and they faced a lot of discrimination. Public transportation did not accommodate wheelchairs. Schools and other public buildings just had stairs. No ramps, no elevators at that time. Children who were disabled after polio were forced to attend separate schools set up for quote “cripple children” or were carried up and down stairs in order to get an education. By the 1970s, these children were adults and they were demanding change, issuing in the disability rights movement. This movement led to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 which protected disabled people from discrimination, so crazy that we need legit laws to just make people be decent. It also brought about the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 which was a big deal. It further protected disabled people from discrimination and also required employers and public institutions like schools to provide accommodations like wheelchair ramps and whatnot.
According to the World Health Organization, polio survivors are one of the largest disabled groups in the world. In 2001 they estimated 10 to 20 million polio survivors still living worldwide. And of course that has gone down and will continue to go down as survivors die and no new polio cases emerge thanks to the polio vaccine which is still administered to children 4 times between the ages of 2 months and 6 years old. I know people have mixed feelings about vaccines especially since Covid, but maybe don’t skip the polio vaccine. It clearly works.
So polio, short lived but scary with lots of lessons to be learned. Number one, don’t underestimate women just because they’re women. Sister Elizabeth Kenny and Dr. Dorothy Horstmann kicked polio’s butt while the men in their professions were floundering in failure after failure. Number two, maybe there is some harm in being too clean, too sterile. Polio epidemics were only hitting developed countries that had spent decades cleaning up their act, sanitary sewer systems, knowledge about germs, personal hygiene, pasteurization, sterilization. When they did this, they severely limited exposure to poliovirus such that people weren’t getting it as babies anymore when it caused only mild, barely noticeable symptoms. They were getting it as children, teens, and even adults when it caused severe symptoms, paralysis, respiratory failure, and death.
So, it just goes to show, a little dirt, a little, dare I say poop, may just improve your health, strengthen your body's own natural defenses, a natural vaccine. I feel like the babies were negatively affected by all the quarantining and sanitizing during Covid. My kids get sick all the time. It’s ridiculous. And I know that’s pretty normal, kids have underdeveloped immune systems, they’re working on it, but also, for the first few years of their lives, they weren’t allowed to be around other people. We hand sanitized not stop, we clorox wiped everything. We all became germiphobes and severely limited their exposure to germs at a time when their immune systems were supposed to be forming. Immune systems form through exposure. No exposure, no defense. I do think that’s part of the reason they’re always getting sick now. Covid measures didn’t keep people from getting sick, they just delayed it. Instead of getting sick every once in a while for the first few years of their lives, they’ve been sick every other week since Covid. Not really but pretty much.
We went to a trampoline park recently that has one of those blue foam pits full of the like blue foam cubes which are so nasty but they love it. We get sick pretty much every time we go here. This trampoline park is actually, I’m almost positive, where my son got Covid back in 2022 when it like first opened back up. He was 3, he had just started preschool. He got Covid, shut the whole preschool down it was horrible. So we were there like last week, and my other kid jumps into the blue foam pit mouth wide open and comes up with all these little bits of blue foam stuck to his tongue. And he’s trying to like pick them off his tongue with his dirty fingers and I’m trying not to gag thinking about all the nasty icky filth that has to be on the foam cause, I mean, how do you clean foam? I’m also probably a little traumatized by the Covid thing, that was our first brush with Covid and it likely came from this very foam pit. And I’m like “wipe it off with your shirt, no don’t your shirt is just as dirty.” And his fingers are in his mouth and they’re the dirtiest thing of all. And then I just took a deep breath and I reminded myself that it’s okay. It’s okay to get dirty. Let it go. Not that we should go back to dumping poop in the streets again or anything but a little poop? Maybe not such a bad thing. If there’s one thing polio taught us it’s that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
Information used in this episode was sourced from Yale School of Medicine, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, PBS, BBC, World Health Organization, Mayo Clinic, and the CDC. As always, links to these sources can be found below:
