The story of polio and the effort to find a cure - from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines and beyond - in the United States. A portrait of America in the early 1950s, using the widespread panic over polio to shed light on national obsessions and fears. Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a tale centered on the rivalry between Salk and Sabin. Oshinsky also tells the story of Isabel Morgan, who might have beaten Salk to the prize if she had not retired to raise a family.

As backdrop to this research, Oshinsky offers a look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O'Connor. The National Foundation "revolutionised fundraising and the perception of disease in America", using "poster children" and the March of Dimes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from a vast army of contributors (instead of a few well-heeled benefactors), creating what is considered by the author to be the largest research and rehabilitation network in the history of medicine.

Oshinsky also touches on how the polio experience "revolutionised" the way in which the government licensed and tested new drugs before allowing them on the market, and the way in which the legal system dealt with manufacturers' liability for unsafe products. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Oshinsky reveals that polio was never the raging epidemic portrayed by the media, but in truth a relatively uncommon disease. But in 1950's America - increasingly suburban, family-oriented, and hygiene-obsessed - the specter of polio, like the specter of the atomic bomb, soon became a "cloud of terror over daily life".

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