outreach. as you go further into westchester, you will see more

of these events popping up. i would like to take note to thank phil, the manager of the mount kisco store. that branch actually paid for all the advertising for this event. we thank them very much. [applause] >> i would also like to take the time to thank joan ripley of the second-story bookshop downtown. she has been there for 34 years and done numerous book signings and is a community icon for the people in the community and we thank her for that. [applause] she is also the past president of the american booksellers association. lastly, this night would not have happened if it were for the hard work of maureen keating. [applause]

who is a polio survivor herself. in 1957 at two years old, she contracted polio. if you know maureen you know , that hasn't held back at all. she has been a pain to everyone here in regard to the american disabilities act. [laughter] for the march of dimes, she was the poster child. very impressive. she was also an honored guest at the white house when they signed the american with disabilities act. she is the founding member of the west chester polio survivor committee. maureen is going to talk and -- is going to talk more about our speaker and how tonight's program will run. thank you for coming out. [applause]

[inaudible] >> that's ok. i'm sure you will hear me know. hi. on behalf of the west chester polio survivors committee, i am proud to welcome you here this evening. i would like to thank a polio colin the reverend, and mohammed of the congregational church for

allowing us to use their parish hall as it is the most wheelchair friendly building and a role model for all of us in our community. i want to thank mike at commerce bank for sponsoring us. i want to make a special thank you to joan ripley. a polio survivor and owner of the second-story bookstore and chappaqua, new york. she agreed to manage this evening's book signing and she has been so gracious throughout this whole process. -- won theavid oceans 2006 pulitzer prize for his book. my friend and polio survivor in the middle aisle suggested it would be wonderful to hear him speak about this topic. i agreed and i said, let me see what i can do.

the professor and his wife agreed to travel from the university of texas in austin to chappaqua, new york as long as this event was free, open to the public and in a wheelchair friendly location and that he could sell his book. this mission was accomplished with help from across our community. i contracted polio in 1957 after having the third polio vaccine. one of only three that year to obtain polio that way in the united states. i know that the subject of this box has opened a pandora's for the polio survivors -- the polio survivors in his room. i want to celebrate our strength in coming out tonight and remind you that americans with disabilities act in 1990 was passed in large part due to uppity polio patients like you joining hands with vietnam

veterans to make our country as accessible to us today as fdr's hudson valley hyde park home was to him in the 1920's. please give professor david oshinsky, winner of the pulitzer :rize for his book "polio an american story," a warm welcome. [applause] >> thank you very much. i am a member of the baby boom generation. as a modern american historian i tend to write about things i remember very well growing up. i wrote a biography about senator joseph mccarthy.

i remember polio. i figure would be impossible for anyone to grow up in that era without having very powerful .emories of polio in that time polio was like the summer plague. it would come around memorial day and leave around labor day and in between, hundreds of thousands of children would be paralyzed. i can remember my mother's fear -- don't go swimming, rest endlessly in the afternoon, don't make new friends because you have the germs of your old ones. you did not want to get the germs. don't going to movie theaters or crowded places, everything a kid

wanted to do was on the no list because of polio. what i also remember is that polio is a very visual disease and i can remember children my age in wheelchairs with crutches and lead braces. -- and leg braces. i remember the horrible pictures of iron lungs in hospital wards lining the walls. i remember new york newspapers printing like baseball box scores the number of polio patients. it would start growing around mid-may and through july and august and peek around labor day. these are memories that are really seared into my consciousness. and into the consciousness of everyone who grew up in this era.

i can also remember the trials of 1954, the largest public health experiment in american history. i will talk about that in a bit. really 2 million children were lined up and either given the vaccine or a placebo and i can remember an entire year later when the results were announced that the vaccine was safe and potent and effective and it brought a celebration to the united states. these are memories i hope we all have and they get very powerful. one of the reasons i wrote this book was to re-create that fear. 2005 was the 50th anniversary of the salk vaccine. the year when the vaccine was determined to be successful. there were commemorations around

the united states because a huge, huge problem and fear have had been lifted. i didn't want to write the typical biography. i didn't want to focus exclusively on the race between salk and sabin for the vaccine, as important as it was. i wanted to look at the cultural dna of the country and show how polio was so important in revolutionizing things that we take for granted today. by that i mean, polio revolutionized philanthropy, medical research, the way the government tests and licenses diseases and revolutionized a lot of the legal problems and liabilities that go along with vaccines. all of this really came out of what we call the polio

experience. polio is an intestinal infection, a viral disease. we know today that polio enters through the mouth, goes down the digestive system, re-creates and replicates in the small intestine, and then is excreted in the stools. in a very small percentage of cases, perhaps one in 200, the virus enters the bloodstream and goes into the central nervous system where it damages the motor neurons that allow muscles to contract. why this happens to this day we do not know. one of the interesting things about polio is once we got the vaccine, so many of these questions became moot. we don't know why polio came in the summer. we have a hint and it's that

intestinal viruses generally flourish in warmer weather. we don't know why polio affected more boys than girls. and it did statistically. the reason according to many doctors of that era was that boys played harder and compromised their immune system. it was just a guess. these are questions we simply don't know. the other question that in some ways is the most interesting is why did polio become epidemic in the 20th century and in the west? what's interesting is the polio virus had always been there but it was endemic, which meant a very few people contracted it. a very few people exposed to

it would get a case of polio. others in western europe and canada and australia but the united states seems to be a key area for polio and the best guess we have is that polio is a disease of cleanliness, meaning the more antiseptic society became in the 20th century, the more concerned we were about killing germs, the more likely children were to be exposed to polio virus at a later age rather than in infancy at the age of two. at thats more virulent age and kids are not protected by maternal antibodies, which will give you a lifetime of immunity to polio. what this says is that dirt is not always bad and in polio, that does appear to be the case. when you think of polio, you think of the march of dimes. i will talk about that in a

minute. an extraordinary organization. what you also think of is its most famous victim, franklin d. roosevelt. maureen mentioned him a moment ago. fdr got polio at the age of 39. the disease then was called infantile paralysis. this big, strapping man from one of the most important and aristocratic families in the united states gets polio and weaves gets it, polio its way into the american consciousness. why did fdr get polio? who knows? i do have a kind of theory. fdr grew up in relative isolation on his estate in the hudson valley. he was not exposed to other children until he went to prep school in new england.

if you look at roosevelt once he got a prep school, his medical history is like an encyclopedia of disease. he comes down with everything. in 1920, roosevelt runs for vice president of the united states. he runs a very good campaign but it's a republican year and they get slaughtered. but he really had worked very, very hard and in the following summer in 1921, fdr is to washington before a republican congressional committee to answer questions about his role in a scandal involving homosexuality in the navy. involving homosexuality in the navy in 1919. roosevelt comes to washington in

brutal heat. he is grilled mercilessly. he leaves depressed, tired, run down, angry, and decides to go to camp where the family has a home off the main canadian coast. roosevelt stops off on the way at a boy scout jamboree in westchester county surrounded by young boys. the last photograph we have of fdr walking unassisted, a very poignant photograph, is at that boy scout camp in a march. roosevelt then goes to camp of -- roosevelt goes to the camp engages in physical , activity to drown his sorrows, falls into the bay, says he has never felt water so chilling,

spends the afternoon in his bathing suit answering correspondence. what your mother told you about chilling is true. it can lower your resistance. now we have a situation where franklin roosevelt had been in washington in terrible heat, under gone a terrible ordeal, come to a boy scout camp surrounded by young kids, engaged in frenetic activity, follow into cold water, and comes down with polio. we do know that if you do engage in heavy physical activity while the polio virus is in your system, the chances of you getting a more severe case are quite likely. that to me is the portrait of franklin roosevelt. it may be wrong, it may be right, it's the best i have to offer. more important, roosevelt spent the rest of his life trying to find a cure for polio.

as some of you may know, he went down to warm springs, georgia, he thought the waters would be therapeutic. he tried every imaginable cure and nothing worked. but what roosevelt did do was to set up the march of dimes. in the 1930's, he put together this organization. he left it to go into politics and to his law partner and the march of dimes -- god bless it -- revolutionized philanthropy and medical research and ways in which we owe them an extraordinary debt. until the march of dimes came along in the 1930's, if you wanted to have a charity, you got together a couple of rich people, they each gave a couple million dollars, and you had a charity. what the march of dimes did was

to turn fundraising on its head. to make it such that everyone would give something and the became thethe dime symbol. rather than having a couple people giving a million dollars, it had several million people giving dimes, quarters, dollars. this got everybody involved in the crusade. it became america's crusade. what else did the march of dimes do? they were the first organization to take up poster children. think of the jerry lewis telethons and what goes on today. everyone has picked that up. maureen was a poster child. they have one every year. it would have a national poster child, usually a young, blond kid in the leg braces walking into the sunshine saying your dimes will cure me of this disease. they would also have a regional poster child. the march of dimes was the first organization to use celebrity power, which is constant today.

virtually every celebrity of that era from grace kelly to mickey mantle, to jackie robinson, to richard nixon. i have a photo in my book as a very uncomfortable richard nixon in a suit pumping gas for polio. what the march of dimes would do would be to hold these gigantic fundraisers where you would have marilyn monroe walking down the runway and modeling the latest fashions of christian dior. they would have these fashion shows all around the country. harry winston had a jewel tour in which he would send the hope diamond and all kinds of famous jewels around the country. people would -- i am told i have sweat on me. it is warm and the lights, thank you.

harry winston would send his jewels around and you would have people pay a dime, a quarter, dollar to get in. the most famous by far was the mother's march against polio which is used today by virtually every organization. my mother was in the mother's march against polio. one night a year, usually on fdr's birthday, millions of together block , by block, precinct by precinct and scour for polio. the symbol was "turn your porch light on" so that any porch light on meant a family would be giving to polio and someone like my mother who hated to be turned down, you knew you were going to a place that would give.

you also knew that if you lived in an apartment building they would put the shoe out front and that meant those people were willing to give for polio. dimes raised hundreds of millions of dollars. more than every other charity combined with the exception of the american red cross. the march of dimes did not join any community chest. it did not share its funds. it said its job was to provide funding for every polio survivor and to find the vaccine that would end this plague. that is what they did. let me talk briefly about medical research. what did the march of dimes do?

the first thing the march of dimes did was to decide it was going to give its money to the best possible people regardless of reputation. it meant that in the case of well-known people, they would not necessarily get grants. the biggest grants went to jonah salk and alan sabin. they were both the jewish at a time when anti-semitism was rampant in the medical community. the march of dimes didn't care. they wanted the people who would find the solution the quickest. at a time when women were dramatically discriminated against, the march of dimes gave funding to dorothy horseman at yell. dorothy never married. she became the first professor of medicine at yale and one of

the few women to be elected to the national academy of sciences. horseman was the one who found out that polio traveled through the blood before it entered the central nervous system, a huge discovery because that meant a vaccine would be successful because a vaccine would go into the blood and produce the antibodies to fight the polio virus. the other woman who was one of my favorites is named isabel morgan. isabel morgan was from johns hopkins. she was the daughter of thomas hunt morgan, a nobel prize-winning geneticist. isabel morgan was working on a killed virus polio vaccine and she was years ahead. salk.ah

in 1949, at the very height -- thank you. all i need to know is a professional trainer, right? perhaps a treadmill. andy nautilus machine and we are in business -- and a nautilus machine and we are in business. thank you. isabel morgan. isabel morgan was well ahead. she was working at hopkins. hopkins had a wonderful research staff. at the very height of her creativity in 1949, isabel morgan left research to marry

and raise a family. she made the decision that women had to make in that era and have to make today. doubts that had isabel morgan stayed the course, we would be today talking about the morgan vaccine and not the salk vaccine. the march of dimes, encouraging ambitious, aggressive researchers did wonderful work. ,let me tell you one other thing the march of dimes did. normally, people's eyes glaze over when you talk about this but if you ever talked at a university, you know universities cannot survive without it. the march of dimes began giving out its own grants. the first one they gave out was to a man who would win the nobel

prize by the name of john enders. he got $50,000 from the march of dimes. he was thrilled but harvard turned it down. harvard said you know, who was going to pay for the lighting, the heating? who was going to pay for the monkeys and the chimps it takes to do these experiments? what the march of dimes did was think up the concept of indirect cost, which means they wouldn't only pay the grant, they would also pay all the costs associated with that grant. folks, let me tell you, in are thet costs lubricant that runs laboratories

and universities throughout the country and we owe this to the march of dimes. they did extraordinary work. this was an era before the federal government was involved. what this meant was that jonah sabin, and others had few restrictions when it came to testing. their testing began with monkeys and chimps but at some point, they had to move on to human beings and what they did with regularity was to go into orphanages, mental hospitals, to test on these kids. it's something today we would find abhorrent. it's something that led to the notion of informed consent later on. this was a very different time.

by 1954, jonas salk was ready to test his vaccine in a larger study on children. killedalk had a poliovirus vaccine and what this would takehat poliovirus, he would put it through a formaldehyde solution that would kill the virus but the virus would have a certain potency and that potency would trick the immune system into making antibodies. had a live virus vaccine. this meant he was taking a weekend poliovirus in weakening it to the point where it would create a natural infection in your system but it would be so weak, it would give you a mild case.

salk's was given through injection. sabin costs given on a sugar cube or a little liquid on your tongue. salk's was the safer vaccine because you were dealing with a chilled poliovirus although it -- with a killed poliovirus although it wasn't perfect. he could also do his more quickly. by 1954, jonas salk was ready for mass testing. what is extraordinary about this is that in 1954, the march of dimes, with no, and i mean no government involvement, begins the largest public health experiment in american history. it takes 2 million children, all of whom are volunteers, and it

runs what is called a double-blind study. what that study means is the people that are giving the vaccine have no idea whether they are giving the real vaccine for the placebo to the child, and the child receiving the vaccine has no idea whether he is getting the real vaccine for the placebo. -- or the placebo. 2 million kids are lined up. can you imagine a parent in 1954 lining a child up for a vaccine? no one knows whether it's going to work. no one knows whether it is perfectly safe. but the fear of polio was so extraordinary that people were pushing their children into line. i came from a neighborhood in queens, which was a tribal ethnic neighborhood. i can remember very well mothers and fathers saying, "we're jewish, salk's jewish, how that can it be -- how bad can it be?" [laughter]

there was truth to this, leave me. jonas salk was vehemently opposed to the double-blind study. why? because he was convinced, and rightly so, that his vaccine worked. and if it worked, how in god's name could you run an experiment where have the children are given a placebo in the midst of polio season? salk said you were allowing tens of thousands of children to come down with polio. but the experts wanted a vaccine that the scientific community would stand behind. it was done double-blind. folks, you are talking about 2 million kids receiving 3 doses

either of a placebo or the real vaccine. they looked identical. they were all coded. you know have millions upon millions of pieces of paper in an era before computers. all of this material has to be tabulated and sent to a center in ann arbor michigan. it takes a full year for the results to be known. in 1955, in april, at a huge press conference, jonas salk's vaccine was founded to be safe, potent, and effective. we heard the news over the school loudspeaker. fire whistles went off. factory whistles went off.

church bells rang. dwight eisenhower actually broke down in tears as he invited jonas salk to the white house and thanked him for saving the children of america. children of american. what i might say as an aside, i found this by looking through salk's fbi file, in the 1940's, when he first joined the surgeon general's office, had to be given a full fbi field investigation. salk and his wife had a very innocently, coming from the ieu of mill you o mill new york city in the 1930's innocently belonged to a number of organizations that were clearly left-wing. salk had quit them as soon as he became a resident.

but the fbi found all of this stuff and put together a file on salk that is enormous. it was up to the surgeon general, at the height of the mccarthy era in 1949 to decide whether jonas salk, and unknown young researcher, should be giving a security clearance. it was a close call. they did a second investigation. salk never knew about this. salk was cleared by the skin of his teeth. had he not been cleared, he clearly would have been dropped by the march of dimes, which was extremely image-conscious. jonas salk would have been out of the vaccine business. there are all kinds of detours in this story. indeed, in 1955, as ike is inviting jonas salk to the white house amidst this enormous pomp and circumstance, there is one isolated letter from j edgar hoover saying, "i wouldn't invite to that commie here." [laughter] some have a very long memories when it came to this.

once the vaccine came out in 1956 with a couple of stumbles, the rate of polio dropped dramatically. albert sabin, who was working on his live polio vaccine, was forced to go to the soviet union in the midst of the cold war to test his vaccine. so many kids in america already had the salk vaccine. sabin loved the soviet union. he said, believe me if you want to test on 80 million people, and you want them to show up, go to the soviet union. he did, and his vaccine turned out to be even stronger, and in many ways better than salk's. by the end of the 1960's, the sabin took over as the vaccine of choice in the u.s.

sabin and salk despised one another. they hated each other. albert sabin said of jonas salk, "i could go into the kitchen and do what that guy did." albert sabin was was the scientist's scientist. they all liked his live virus vaccine. jonas salk remained the people's scientist. he is the one we remember. in the year 2000, time magazine did a story on the 100 most influential scientists in the world in the 20th century. only jonas salk, among all polio researchers, was on that list. there is a wonderful cover which shows sigmund freud analyzing albert einstein with a couch and the picture of jonas salk on the table. those of the three men seen by

time magazine as the three premiere scientists. of all major polio researchers, only one was not admitted to the national academy of sciences, and that was jonas salk. it was a scandal, but salk was blackballed from the academy by sabin and others. salk was once asked whether he felt bad that given what he had done, he had never been awarded the nobel prize. salk looked at the questioner and said, you know, it doesn't bother me, because everyone thinks i did win it. [laughter] the two men battled it out until the day they died in the 1990's. when they did pass, albert

sabin, in literally his last breath said, jonas salk was a bad scientist who produced a bad vaccine. and literally boom, he keeled over. [laughter] i could go on and talk about post-polio syndrome. i could talk about the way vaccines have come to virtually and polio in the united states although it does still exist in africa. let me end by just telling you what i think the great lesson of this polio story is. this was america's great voluntary moment. this was a crusade in which

millions upon millions of people gave their money, their time, indeed their children, to fight a horrific disease. the government was barely ever involved. it was simply too early. there were no red states and no blue states. we united as a nation. we gave everything we could give. we never found a cure for polio, but we did find the vaccine that has saved untold numbers of young lives. and for that, it is a story well worth remembering. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. thank you.

i'm here to answer any questions that you might have. anyone who has a question or would like to make a statement, or a comment, please feel free to walk up to the microphone and i will try to answer it as best i can. >> i was a medical student in 1952 and was employed by the polio foundation in chicago. i worked, filled out forms, worked maybe 100 young kids, but some adults. we experimented with a means of determine which patients would it develop respiratory difficulty. we had a little room -- the iron

lung, which was a terrible instrument. i don't know what happened to those people. what did happen to them? prof. oshinsky: that is a good question. i open a chapter in my book with a story of a man who contracted polio at the age of 25, and spent the next 20 years in an iron lung. iron lungs were invented in the 1920's at harvard. they were supposed to be for the gas company for workers that have been overcome. they would be in there for a short period of time. no one expected someone with polio with a diaphragm closed down, that they would be in iron lungs for years and years. fred went to notre dame football games, became a champion bridge player, had three kids. you were allowed out of the lung for brief periods. [laughter] but he eventually died. there is a woman in a tennessee,

53 years later, who is still living in an iron lung today, which is quite extraordinary. one of the problems is that no one knows how to make the replacement parts anymore. either you got out of that iron lung within 3-4 weeks and could read on your own, or you could be in there for a very long time. many people were in there for 10, 15, 20 years and their bodies would break down and they would die. yes? >> what is your story about the alleged protections we now get from the fda and huge amounts of funding we now mostly benefit from the ih? prof. oshinsky: that is a very good question. we could not survive today without the funding from the nih, the cdc, and god knows how many other organizations.

they really did step into the breach in the mid-1950's. one of the reasons they did was because of the success of the research program that had begun by the march of dimes. the federal government and drug companies have now become the bulwark of research money and for r&d. what it tells us is that this is now the government's role in our society. i don't know whether we will ever go back to the voluntary era. what it also tells us is that we have, to some degree, let the government take on that role. there is still in enormous role for charitable organizations in the raising of research fund money. they should play an even bigger role than they are playing

today. any other questions? yes sir. can you all hear me? the question was about polio -- was about post polio syndrome. there are people in this room who can answer that question a lot better than i. i will in fact turn over the microphone to them in a minute. when i will say is that most people who had polio survived it. they basically saw polio as a static disease, meaning it wasn't going to get any worse or recur. that, in fact, has not happened. it's not that the virus was

dormant and somehow risen again. what appears to have happened, and we now have a name for all of these symptoms, weaknesses of muscle, trouble breathing, tiredness, tremendous aches and pains -- about 40 years later, through the aging process, what we think we know about post polio syndrome is that when you got polio, your nerve endings that had not been destroyed would take on additional function. they would actually sprout new axioms. what begins to happen over time is that there is such pressure put on these nerves that were not destroyed that they simply begin to break down. as of someone put it, if you

have a 10 cylinder car, and suddenly have a 4 cylinder car, the parts in that car are going to dissolve. that appears to be what post polio syndrome is about. you have lots of doctors who are saying the best thing is , probably to exercise more to keep the muscles functioning. other doctors are saying just the opposite, rest as best you can. there is a tremendous amount of research that must be done. this is a problem that appears to affect one in two polio survivors to some degree. if there is any survivor here that would like to talk about that, please feel free to do so. is there anybody here? yes, would you like to come up? can i give you the microphone? thanks very much.

>> hi, maureen and i were diagnosed with post polio syndrome. in 1984, when i had my first cast taken off, i broke my patella for the first time, the doctor informed me that what i did have was post polio syndrome. he gave me a picture of getting weaker, not being able to work full-time anymore, going to have half days being too tired to do , things. he said by age 60, you would be in a wheelchair. he was dead-on. since then i have had to live my life in a different way. i am tired. i don't work full-time or do anything a lot. i have to rest a lot. when i do a lot, i just have to take it for the next day, i'm completely knocked out.

i've lived a full life until that point. doctors that we have say that we have to preserve our energy. and other doctors say that exercising would be great, some say no. it's like a constant battle between the doctors. prof. oshinsky: thank you very much. yes ma'am. i am a post polio survivor. i had it in 1934. i was treated differently than anybody else, i can guarantee it. my mother had all the bad things that ever happened with doctors happened to her. when i had polio, i had a chiropractor. in 1935, she treated me with hot packs. she did it the usual the other word? manipulation.

i was doing very well. i could do everything except ice skate and ride a two wheel bike. i did everything. in the last year and a half, i had to have back surgery because i had spinal stenosis which my , brother had the year before. i had to have a fusion. everything went well. i had a six months rehab. i was using a cane, as i was before. i am on crutches now. i got bursitis in my hip. since that time, i have gone downhill and now i'm trying to work on going uphill. some doctors -- they all seem to think that i should do exercise, particularly in water. i'm not sure if we got the idea from fdr, swimming for polio. go in the pool it's fine. ,i do not think that is how it

works. but anyhow, my experience is that for 70 years, i did find. i didn't seem to have any post polio, and suddenly after surgery, boom. whether it is surgery, recovery from the neurological problems or post polio, they are questioning. so i am interested in post polio. prof. oshinsky: thank you. are you all familiar with sister kenny? she mentioned sister kenny. you are. kennyriefly, sister claimed to be a nurse, and she was close enough. she was australian. she was not a doctor, she was a woman. we are talking three strikes and you're out before you hit the united states. what she did is to revolutionize the way polio patients dealt

with their illness. until then, they literally put you in plaster of paris and immobilized you for a year or more. when you got out your muscles were so atrophied and you were so weak that if you were not paralyzed when you went in, you were damn lucky not to be paralyzed when you went out. sister kenny believed in muscle manipulation. she believed in hot packs, and i see some people are burning hotting packs of wool onto your body as a way of loosening up the muscles. manipulating the muscles, in other words, gentle exercise was good. the sister erroneously believed polio was a muscle disease, not a disease of the nerves. but basically her way of helping people was so much more humane,

and in the end, works a lot better. the problem is not being a doctor, not being american, and begin a woman, she literally was asked to leave the united states, and did. and died shortly thereafter. there is a sister kenny institute in minneapolis, where she worked, that still those does wonderful work with paralyzed people. any other questions? >> i would like to supplement all of the good things that you have been talking about -- keenly interested indeed, as is the entire audience -- i am a product of the same era that you are speaking about because in 1944, i had finished my college, went on to take a masters

degree, which i was able to do with a scholarship. at that point, when i graduated as a physical therapist, somebody said, you know, there is an opportunity to learn the sister kenny method. oh, i said, i have heard about that. and so i was given a scholarship to do that. and i learned her method was immediately taken on by the march of dimes. the first epidemic i had the privilege of serving in. that was in north carolina. everybody knows at that time of hickory, north carolina. i was assigned to the charlotte memorial hospital. i remember it extremely well. among other things, the influx of polio patients from the entire countryside.

they traveled into charlotte. prof. oshinsky: that is correct. >> the hospital couldn't possibly take care of that many. what they did was to build a tent city. i was in charge of one tent and my tent group consisted of maybe 20 patients. i was responsible for those patients. other therapists had another tent, etc. supplementing the information you gave about the iron lung, one child came in with such a deficiency of breathing ability, it was pitiful. all he could do was gasp, i don't want to go into the iron lung. i got the message, but of course that was his destiny. i talked to him before he went

in. i said, we've got a gadget here that is a respirator. you will find that this is your friend. the little boy believed me, and in he went into the iron lung. and i said isn't that better? now you can really breathe because this fellow called a respirator is your friend. all of a sudden there were signs, "this is a respirator, this is a respirator, this is not an iron lung." [laughter] and in due time, this child prospered and came out of the iron lung. we would do small trials, come out for a little bit, then go back into your friend. before he was dismissed, i took him aside and i said, when you

came in, you didn't want a certain thing, and you work it -- and you were given your friend the respirator. i have to tell you he has a nickname. don't fall over -- this is an iron lung. [applause] prof. oshinsky: thank you. as some of you may know, hickory, north carolina had some -- had one of the worst polio epidemics in american history. the march of dimes, within 30 days, built an entire hospital in hickory. flew in the doctors, epidemiologists, nurses, physical therapists, iron lungs, and dealt with hundreds upon hundreds of cases. not the state of north carolina, not the federal government, the march of dimes, a voluntary organization.

quite extraordinary. any other questions? i will say, for someone your age, i much appreciate your guts in doing this, we might have to lower the microphone a bit. i teach at the university of texas and i have students a little bit taller than she. when i mentioned polio, they have no clue. to them, it is a vaccine, and not a disease. in a way, that's a wonderful thing. >> i'm wondering what country brought polio. prof. oshinsky: okay, where did it start? there are actually wall carvings from egypt showing what appears to be people with polio. we know that polio was endemic in the middle east.

we know that was apparent in -- that it was in parts of russia. the first big epidemic that we can document appears to take place in italy, and then england then sweden. , the first major epidemic in the united states occurred in vermont in the early 1900s. the biggest polio epidemic in history occurred in new york city in 1916, in which thousands upon thousands of children came down with polio. several thousand died. as you might expect, was blamed on immigrants bringing the germs in from foreign countries. what is extraordinary about the great polio epidemic of 1916 is that it occurred in the midst of world war i. in a time when 100,000 british soldiers might be killed in a three-week advance of 12 feet.

given the amount of carnage in europe this would not get much , publicity. as you know, there was i a gigantic flu epidemic in 1919 which killed about a half million. these are remembered very well. the first great polio epidemic which occurred in new york is not remember that well. yes sir, you have a question? >> you keep speaking about the great work that the march of dimes did. i assume that behind the march of dimes, there were people. who were those people? prof. oshinsky: the two most if lunch of people were harry weaver, the director of research.

harry weaver was not a great scientist bu. havharry weaver was good at organizing other scientists and having them follow a program that would directly to a vaccine. giving out money to various scientists. but they were all going their own way. harry got a program going, instituted long-term grants, which were also revolutionary. if you were good and followed the program, the grant kept coming. if you didn't, the plug was pulled. harry with the guy who thought up in direct cost. -- indirect cost. the kingpin of the march of dimes was basil o'connor. basil o'connor worked without any salary. he was the march of dimes for the first 25 years.

he was the man who organized literally every single chapter. what they zone -- what basil o'connor said when he went around is that, you are going to have a local march of dimes chapter here. you are going to raise the funds. we will allow you to keep half the money you raise here, and that will be to help polio patients in your area. you will give half the money to the national organization, which will use that money for publicity and for putting scientists on the path towards a vaccine. it was basil o'connor that in almost military fashion, was the man who -- really the power behind the throne of the march of dimes. let me say one more thing.

i honestly believe had franklin roosevelt not gone back into politics, there was a time when 8e had polio from 1921 to 192 hefrom 1921 to 1928 when rode it out and did not do anything political. any democrat who ran lost. roosevelt bided his time, waiting for democrats to come back into fashion. and in 1928, he was asked to run for governor of new york state. as some of you may know, it was all smith who was the first catholic to run for president. al smith wanted to win new york state. he asked fdr to run for governor. one of the great ironies, fdr is elected governor, al smith is destroyed in a landslide and

loses to herbert hoover and even loses new york state. had roosevelt not one of that election in 1928, i believe he probably would have become his own march of dimes man. in other words, he would have been the basil o'connor. roosevelt had enormous interest in the march of dimes. and in ending polio. some of you may know there are tens of thousands of photographs of fdr taken while he was president, but only two showing him in leg braces or in a wheelchair not covered by a blanket. on the one hand, people knew that he had his disability. on the other hand, she never ever wanted to be put in a compromising position where he could be seen as not doing his job. what is amazing is when you look at cartoons in the 1930's, they

show him running and jumping. they show him as if he did not have this disability. roosevelt was very coy about it. it was called the grand deception. as some may know, when they wanted to build an fdr memorial in washington, the question then became, how are you going to portray this man? are you going to portray him honestly as someone with a disability, who spent most of his adult life paralyzed from the waist down, or are you going to show him without this? and at first they showed him without this disability. it was disability rights people who demanded another roosevelt be shown. that is the roosevelt in a wheelchair. at the fdr memorial there are both. fdr was how complex about his own disability and polio.

yes, sir? >> 3 questions. first, how was the virus transmitted person-to-person? was it transmitted that way? could i get it from you? prof. oshinsky: it is transmitted person-to-person, usually through unclean objects, fecal waste. it can be transmitted through but it isater, usually close human contact. the kind where it has to get into your mouth and head down the digestive system. >> we learned that polio was awful. what have we learned, march of dimes included, that prepares or does not prepare us for bird flu

and other health problems coming down the pike? bird flu in particular, because part of polio was that there was fear. "don't go near him, he is crippled, he is contagious." there is a lot of fear because no one knew. prof. oshinsky: one of the problems with polio is that there was no prevention. there was absolutely no prevention. in other words, it didn't matter. you could be the most hands-on parent in the world, you could not protect your child from polio. it was impossible. mothers did know that. i think that is why they were so frightened. i also believe that is why they gave so readily to the march of dimes because they felt so , helpless. the only way they could end this was through a vaccine. what the march of dimes did, they tried on the one hand --

there wasn't fear mongering, but the were in the fund-raising march of dimes business. they had a lot of madison avenue razzle-dazzle. they did make polio into the sort of premier disease. on the same hand, they tried to calm people as well. they didn't do a particularly good job of it. but what they wanted people to know is that it was relatively hard to transmit, you could take certain precautions. make sure that your water was clean, your child is rested, he didn't go swimming in very cold water, etc. none of it really worked, but the march of dimes private. -- march of dimes tried it. what is going to prepare us for the avian flu? what will prepare us is a massive campaign to have vaccines ready. a campaign to educate people, in this case, about how it can be transmitted.

at this point locally, it is uckily it isoint local , still animal to animal, and animal to human. it is not human to human. there is still time. my sense is with avian flu, if it does come, there will have to be quarantines. there will have to be a public health service that is ready. there will have to be massive amounts of very powerful viral flu vaccines. we basically have to hope for the best. one of the best ways we can prevent it now is to keep it where it is, isolate the people who have it, till the chickens -- kill the chickens and the birds that have it -- kill the chickens and birds that have it and prevent it from coming to the united states. yes, sir? >> hi, i am from the university

of michigan school of public health. i am doing an internship. i am very interested in your comments, the impact that the march of dimes made in medical research in universities. could you make some comments on that? medical research in universities. prof. oshinsky: they were extraordinary. what they did was literally -- what the march of dimes did was so extraordinary -- not only set up polio units, they set up virology so that we can learn more about viruses. johns hopkins and yale were given tremendous amounts of money from the marshall dimes -- from the march of dimes. not just on polio, but learning

more about viruses and epidemiology and vaccination. it gave huge amounts of money to the university of cincinnati, to the university of pittsburgh. they were very very good at setting up committees of the best virologists in the country that would hand out grants. the march of dimes was extraordinary. what happens with them which is understandable, is that once polio is no longer seen as a major problem in the u.s., at least in terms of children getting it, the march of dimes has to decide that if they want to stay alive as a philanthropic organization, what do they do? polio is a nonstarter in terms of fundraising at this point. but they also want to stay not only within their area of expertise, but the real in which people know our good work. meaning pediatrics, any

children. -- meaning children. what the march of dimes does very cleverly's move into areas of premature birth, genetic diseases among very newborn children. they have been very successful. that is where their research dollars are going today. they have done a darn good job. the one thing that i will say, and this will be my final point, as i'm told we have reached the end, as the march of dimes phased it self out of the polio business, rotary international phased itself in. rotary has been phenomenal in trying to give money to vaccinate children around the world, particularly for polio, but for other diseases as well. rotary is very good. they have lots of international

members. they send people out into the field. they are trying to to end polio, which would be incredible. end polio as a disease in the world by 2010. they are now getting help from the bill and melinda gates foundation, from the u.n., from the cdc -- they are doing a phenomenal job. rotary has not gotten the publicity that march of dimes has gotten, but they will reach their goal in the not-too-distant future of wiping polio off the face of the earth. what better gift to jonas salk, albert sabin, to basil of basill low, -- to

o'connor, to have a day in this world when no child thank you will get polio ever again. thank you very much. announcer: you are watching american history tv. all weekend every weekend on c-span3. like us on facebook at c-span history. c-span takes you on the road to the white house and into the classroom. this year our student cam documentary contest asks students what issues they would like to hear from the presidential candidates. follow the road to the white house coverage and get details about the student can contest on c-span.org. announcer: next on american history tv, retired air force officer and national war college historian mark clodfelter talks about "american airpower." the national defense university hosted this hour-long talk as