Polio

David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 352. £18.99. ISBN 0–19–515294–8. On the fiftieth anniversary of the licensure of the Salk vaccine against poliomyelitis, it is perhaps both unsurprising and fitting that several new books about polio have been published. In an extremely readable narrative, David Oshinsky tells a gripping story about the widespread fear of poliomyelitis in mid-twentieth-century America and the race to find a cure, over a period from the early publicity about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's struggle with the disease, to the March of Dimes campaigns, to the development of the two vaccines by Salk and Sabin. The author draws primarily on the recently released papers of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, the two leading researchers for a cure, but also incorporates the stories of other key scientists including Thomas Francis and Isabel Morgan. Morgan is portrayed as the most talented of all the polio researchers who might well have beaten the men to a cure if she had not left science to look after a family

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