SCREEN THE BABY, SWAT THE FLY : POLIO IN THE NORTHEASTERN UNITED STATES, 1916.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Rogers, Naomi.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Subjects (All):

Public health.

United States--History.

United States.

History.

0337.

0573.

Local Subjects:

0337.

0573.

Physical Description:

206 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 47-12A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

This study examines the social and medical issues raised by the largest epidemic of poliomyelitis in the United States. Polio was a problem of the new century and the new world. Rising standards of living increasingly protected children from middle-class families from the immunity usually conferred by a milder (nonparalytic) form of the polio virus. In 1916 large numbers of polio cases were reported in cities such as New York City, Philadelphia and Newark for the first time. The confusing nature of the epidemic provided a focus for the continuing debate about the definition of disease and health reform in the Progressive era. Immigrant families were singled out, and made the center of public health efforts and public hysteria.

The traditional connection between poverty, filth and disease was consistently challenged by the major epidemiological studies of polio during this period. Public officials recognized that clean-up campaigns had not succeeded in abating the spread of the disease, but they continued to blame the sanitary ignorance and carelessness of immigrant families.

The new tools of bacteriologic science did not help to clarify or control polio. Neither scientist nor doctor could tell parents why their child was stricken and not another's, why their house and not a neighbor's. Officials stressed that it was the duty of the housekeeper to monitor her family's health; and an extensive fly campaign directed attention to the home and the individual. Immigrant families were instructed to keep their house and children clean; civic-minded citizens walked the streets of the slums with flyswatters, screens and sanitary advice. Yet the irony of this story is that these efforts were directed to just those homes in which children were likely to be protected from paralytic polio. The American city was the locus of epidemic polio not because it was the center of physical and moral disorder, but because more homes were clean, more children vulnerable. A belief in individual responsibility blinded scientists and officials to evidence which might have suggested something quite opposite: that disease can appear in orderly environments, spread by those usually considered least culpable. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-12, Section: A, page: 4496.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1986.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.