PHYSICIANS ON THE FRONT LINE
SPECIAL AIR MISSION: POLIO
AUTHOR Charles C. Smith, Jr., MD
This paper is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Dr. Roy Saxton
Cornell, who gave his life for his fellow man.
W
hile serving as a flight surgeon
in the United States Air Force
1956-58, I participated in a
number of missions to move po-
lio patients in iron lungs both in
the “zone of interior” and from
overseas. This is a story about
those missions and the path it provided to,
at that time, a watershed in medical progress.
Rosemary and I went on a nostalgia trip to San Antonio one
year in May. We visited all our old haunts and my old base, now the
home of the School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks AFB, Texas. I
had written them in January 2002 sending a copy of my orders and
a newspaper clipping about one of my missions. A colonel from the
school called and we were granted access to the school archives and
visited the museum, where one of our old iron lungs is on display.
Poliomyelitis was a major player in the lives of those of us in
my age group. The threat was a constant in the lives of our mothers
especially. You couldn’t go swimming or to the movies during late
summer in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s because of it. You played
with a friend one day, and in the next 48 hours they might be dead.
My six-year-old first cousin was one of those who died. It was best
known then by its other name, infantile paralysis. For example, I
took one of the new first-year medical students to the movies as his
second-year host at the Kentucky Theater in the fall of 1952, and
two days later he was in an iron lung at Louisville General Hospital.
This disease has probably existed for thousands of years. Egyp-
tian steles (1580-1350 BC) showed withered legs. [1] Epidemics were
common in this country in the first half of the 20 th century starting
with the 1916 New York City polio epidemic. In New York City alone
that year there were 8,900 cases and 2,400 deaths. There were 27,000
cases and 6,000 deaths across 26 states. This disease was not related
to filth and poverty, striking all strata of society. There was also the
suggestion that children in wealthier families who had less exposure
to other children and poor hygiene were more susceptible since
they had no opportunity to acquire antibodies through subclinical
infection. [2] This was also the explanation for so many very young
children contracting the disease, thus the name, infantile paralysis.
Early in 1916, Simon Flexner of Louisville and Hideyo Nogu-
chi of the Rockefeller Institute thought they had seen the microbe
causing it. [3] Of course, John Enders won the Nobel Prize for his
discovery of the actual virus in 1948. Perhaps fortuitously it struck
a political heir who was to become a powerful president. Franklin
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