Fear Is the Key

Abstract

It was obvious from early in the polio season that 1949 was going to be a bad year for several countries. In Washington, DC, the Surgeon General told Americans to expect ‘the worst year for infantile paralysis in the history of the USA’. Across the Atlantic, where an English winter had failed to snuff out the tail end of the 1948 epidemic, the British Medical Journal warned that the omens were ‘sufficiently grave’. Meanwhile, Swedes were preparing themselves for their annual epidemic and wondering if this one might outstrip the biggest on record, in 1936. And in South Africa, an outbreak brewing up in the Transvaal was already filling up the beds in Johannesburg’s Fever Hospital.^1–4