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Throughout most of the 20th century, hospitals operated under strict
and orderly patient regimens. Nurses enforced a military-like discipline
in the wards. Epidemic conditions, combined with the lack of a cure
for polio, heightened everyone’s anxiety.
During a 1934 epidemic in Los Angeles, 5 percent of doctors and 11 percent of nurses who treated polio patients contracted the disease.
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Left: Doctors and nurses on the
hospital steps, Toomey Pavilion, Cleveland, Ohio, 1955 Courtesy of Post-Polio
Health International
Right: Doctors wearing protective masks as they examine a patient in a polio ward, Hickory, North Carolina, 1944
Courtesy of Marc Shell
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“In no disease, except perhaps pneumonia, is expert nursing care so essential.”
—Dr. T. Campbell Thompson, 1938 |
“The nurses caring for patients in iron lungs
had to be attuned to their respiratory needs at all times to keep them
alive, which meant being with the patient physically and psychically.
Decisions had to be made regarding suctioning, postural drainage, giving
oxygen, and the need for emergency tracheostomy, and nurses had to make
these minute-to-minute decisions.”
—Lynne Dunphy, family nurse practitioner,
2001 |
Left: Doctors resting outside a tent during
the epidemic at Hickory, North Carolina, 1944 Courtesy of Marc Shell
Right: Emergency hospital tents erected during the epidemic at Hickory, North
Carolina, 1944
Courtesy of Marc Shell
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“In the town of Hickory, in the western foothills of
North Carolina, more than 100 children lie in hastily built beds….
The suddenness with which the disease struck overwhelmed ordinary medical
facilities…. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis mobilized
local and national resources to set up the emergency hospital.”
—LIFE magazine, 1944 |
