The first outbreak of polio in the United States struck Rutland County, Vermont, in the summer of 1894. The disease began with fever, sore throat, and fatigue; it sometimes went on to damage the brain and spinal cord, paralyzing or even killing its hosts. Charles Caverly, a local physician, chronicled the devastation using detailed maps and notes. “Boy, 10 years; died within twenty-four hours with convulsions,” he wrote. “Boy, 10 months; died on sixth day, all extremities paralyzed. . . . Girl, 11 years; died on third day, no paralysis noted. . . . Male, 22 years; died on third day, both legs paralyzed.” Within weeks, a hundred and thirty-two people, mostly children, had been paralyzed, and eighteen had died.
In the coming decades, polio became a familiar menace. Summer, when the virus exacted its heaviest toll, was dubbed “polio season.” The virus crippled children and adults, often paralyzing their respiratory muscles and confining thousands to iron lungs. In 1916, New York City recorded nine thousand cases of polio and six thousand deaths. In August of 1921, Franklin Roosevelt, then a thirty-nine-year-old lawyer, fell off a sailboat and into the icy waters of the Bay of Fundy; the next day, he noticed lower-back pain, and within a week he could no longer stand. The pace and size of outbreaks accelerated. Even though the polio death rate declined in the decades that followed, owing to advances in medical care, the virus still disabled more than thirty-five thousand people a year during the nineteen-forties. In 1952-the year the virus peaked in America-nearly sixty thousand people were infected, and more than three thousand died. Parents refused to let their kids play outside. Cities introduced social-distancing measures. Summer camps were cancelled; schools were shut down; bars and theatres closed.