THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605030748
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROGER K. MILLER
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
IN THE SHADOW OF POLIO
A Personal and Social History
KATHRYN BLACK
Addison-Wesley. 307 pp. $23.
Not far into In the Shadow of Polio: A Personal and Social History, Kathryn Black captures the essence of the scourge of the polio years in this country: ``No statistic can account for the awe and dread that surrounded polio. What nearly everyone who grew up in the polio years or who was rearing a child then remembers was the fear that hung like heat in the summer air.''
Yes, it did. If you were there, a whiff of that fear, and even that summer heat, will come back to you in this excellent narrative. If you were not, you will want to read it to understand what we were all so afraid of. For, while statistics alone can't tell the story, there was an epidemic of crippling polio somewhere in the United States almost every year from 1900 to 1956. When it came into its strength, from 1942 to 1953, it felled up to 60,000 Americans a year.
The author was 4 when her mother, Virginia Black, contracted polio. It was June 1954, and Virginia was 28 and the mother of two in Phoenix. Hers was an extreme case that left Virginia totally dependent on others, a quadriplegic unable to breathe without an iron lung or other respiratory assistance. Just short of two years later, she was dead.
But it wasn't polio that killed her. As severely handicapped as she was, she had survived polio. It was something else that took her life. The core of this book is a search for what that was.
Thus, In the Shadow of Polio is exactly what its subtitle says, ``a personal and social history.'' The personal aspect helps make the book both affecting and effective. Perhaps because her mother's documented record proved so thin, the author was also forced to examine other cases, as well as the gamut of related polio phenomena, to gain an idea of what she suffered. This makes it a rich social history.
Black is quite skillful at weaving generic information of what was going on at the time into a discussion of Virginia's situation. People didn't know how you ``got'' polio - was it from peaches? Ice cream? Public drinking fountains? Why was it associated with summer? Why did it affect boys more severely than girls? What was the role of stress in contracting it? Even today, not all of these questions have answers.
But the anguish it caused families was considerable: ``Parents desperate for glimpses of their stricken children held in isolation leaned ladders against hospital walls and climbed to peer in the windows.''
In delving into the personal history Black uncovered some troubling things that she suggests are related to her mother's death. Neither her mother nor her father, Del, dealt well with the illness. Even after she was brought home from the hospital, Virginia was ``fraught with fear, discouragement and depression.'' Del thought she would never recover and prayed for one of them to die.
While trying to be understanding of her father, Black nevertheless remains bitterly disappointed that he all but ``begged for a way out.'' He mostly stayed away from Virginia, and when she died, he took off, leaving Black and her older brother to be raised by Virginia's parents.
Black contrasts this with other families of polio victims, even those as handicapped as Virginia, who faced the crisis squarely, tried to normalize their family life, and kept an optimistic outlook all the while realizing that little could be done. Of one such family she says, ``They are the family I wish we could have been.''
So, though it wasn't part of her original quest, Black found what her mother ``died of,'' even if she couldn't give it a name. It was the same sort of thing that, after the death, kept her family from speaking of Virginia or her two-year struggle, a silence that compounded rather than hid the loss.
Black does not dwell on the irony, but in April 1954, two months before her mother fell ill, the Salk polio vaccine was introduced. The Sabin vaccine came the next year, and within a couple of years a public that had been frightened out of its wits by polio grew apathetic. Within a decade, cases fell from 38,000 to 570 annually.
But while it raged, polio wrought devastation - physically, psychologically and emotionally - a lesson that Black ably brings home, in more ways than one. MEMO: Roger K. Miller, a former book editor of The Milwaukee Journal, is a
free-lance writer in Grafton, Wis. by CNB