About Acute Polio

by Tony Gould
London, England Author of A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors

A Brief History

Poliomyelitis has been around since antiquity. An Egyptian wall-plaque from the period 1580-1350 BC depicts a young man with a withered leg, leaning on a staff. The term poliomyelitis derives from two Greek words, polios, meaning grey, and myelos, or matter, and refers to the grey matter of the spinal cord. The disease has had many names, including infantile paralysis, Heine-Medin disease, myelitis of the anterior horns, and paralysis of the morning.

The first attempt at a clinical description appeared in the second edition of Michael Underwood's Diseases of Children (1789), which attributed polio to "teething and foul bowels." The first reported outbreak was of four cases in Worksop, England, in 1835, and the first systematic investigation of poliomyelitis was written in Germany in 1840 by the afore­mentioned Jacob von Heine.

A puzzling aspect of polio was its transformation at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century from a comparatively rare endemic disease into an epidemic disease in the world's most advanced societies, particularly in Scandinavia and the United States. Epidemics in Stockholm in 1887, in Vermont in 1894, and in Sweden again in 1905 and 1911 prefigured the great New York epidemic of 1916, in which 27,000 people, mainly but by no means exclusively children, were disabled and 6,000 died. Public health authorities responded by placarding houses where it had struck and by tearing children suspected of having polio from their mothers' arms to remove them to hospitals.