Charles Halsted
Davis, California, United States

In the springtime of my internship year, I rotated onto the polio ward where I learned that poliomyelitis could kill by paralyzing the muscles of breathing. Eight years before, Salk had shown that injection of his vaccine of inactive virus could prevent polio about half the time. By nineteen sixty, Sabin had proven that this fatal disease could be prevented and cured by his oral vaccine.

Nevertheless, the Sabin oral vaccine arrived too late for the sickest patients who were doomed to spend the rest of their lives in iron lungs. In these body-sized devices lay the patients whose chests could not expand, who could not inhale deeply enough to remain alive.

Upon arrival on the polio ward, I discovered ten body-sized iron cylinders in two rows of five, each equipped with a suction device to promote respiration. I watched over the survivors by listening to their lungs at least once an hour. By reaching my stethoscope-holding hand through an opening in each iron cylinder, I could distinguish clear breathing from the gurgles of failed respiration, the harbinger of a downward spiral to death.

During my rotation, I worked with the night nurse, a middle-aged woman, an avid baseball fan. In my mind’s eye, I imagined my polio-stricken patients listening through their iron cages to the faint radio sounds of every game, silently cheering on their home team.