As I was working on a novella proposal, I needed to research a few things quickly to see if and how I could use them. I decided to give the mother of my hero polio, so I did a little research to get a better understanding of the disease.
I remember as a child receiving the oral polio vaccine via a sugar cube.
Several years ago, I read a book called Small Steps about a girl who got polio and her journey through it. But I couldn’t remember details of the where and when.
I needed a timeline for polio and the history so I could have my story take place in an appropriate year and such. I also needed to know if adults ever contracted polio or if it was strictly a child’s disease. I found the information I needed.
Though mostly a childhood disease, adults who hadn’t been exposed to it when young could contract it. Also, because of an outbreak in Vermont in 1894, that helped me zero in on a year after that to set my story. I chose 1901. I needed it to be long enough after that for my hero and his mother to have lived with the aftereffects long enough for it to become their new normal.
But in doing this research, I learned something very interesting that I never would have guessed.
Polio has been around for thousands of years. No surprise. But it had little to no effect on populations until the middle of the 1800s. Before this time, outbreaks were either so limited that they weren’t recognized or weren’t recorded. A lot of people could have had polio and not even have known it. Fever and aches, and BAM their body has created antibodies when they thought maybe they had the flu. Some don’t even have any symptoms. Others have all that as well as temporary or permanent paralysis. And still other have respiratory failure, which was why Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw developed the iron lung in 1929. The iron lung saved many lives. The girl in Small Steps was placed in an iron lung.
I needed a timeline for polio and the history so I could have my story take place in an appropriate year and such. I also needed to know if adults ever contracted polio or if it was strictly a child’s disease. I found the information I needed.
Though mostly a childhood disease, adults who hadn’t been exposed to it when young could contract it. Also, because of an outbreak in Vermont in 1894, that helped me zero in on a year after that to set my story. I chose 1901. I needed it to be long enough after that for my hero and his mother to have lived with the aftereffects long enough for it to become their new normal.
But in doing this research, I learned something very interesting that I never would have guessed.
Polio has been around for thousands of years. No surprise. But it had little to no effect on populations until the middle of the 1800s. Before this time, outbreaks were either so limited that they weren’t recognized or weren’t recorded. A lot of people could have had polio and not even have known it. Fever and aches, and BAM their body has created antibodies when they thought maybe they had the flu. Some don’t even have any symptoms. Others have all that as well as temporary or permanent paralysis. And still other have respiratory failure, which was why Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw developed the iron lung in 1929. The iron lung saved many lives. The girl in Small Steps was placed in an iron lung.
 |
| Iron Lung photo courtesy of the CDC PHIL collection |
So what changed to cause polio to go from being an occasional illness over thousands of years to having epidemics starting in the mid-1800s sweep around the world?
Sanitation!
Surprisingly, the cleaner people became and the increase of more sanitary conditions created a ripe environment for polio to spread. Yes, you heard that right. Sanitary conditions made people more susceptible to polio. Of course, no one knew that at the time. In trying to clean things up to get rid of other killer diseases like typhoid, cholera, and dysentery, polio was able to bloom and spread. How could this be when people, environments, food, and water were cleaner?
When a baby is born, it has antibodies that were past to it from the mother in the womb and from the first breast milk. If the mother has been exposed to polio in her lifetime, she has fought it off and developed antibodies that temporarily protects the baby by receiving her antibodies.
Before sanitation became a thing, a newborn would have been exposed to polio in its unclean environment while being protected by its mother’s antibodies. So when exposed, the baby could fight off the disease and develop its own antibodies with minimal to no symptoms. No one would have likely noticed that the baby was even exposed. So most people were “immunized” very early in life. Only those with poor or weak immune systems reached the second (often paralyzing) phase of the disease.
So if a baby, in this new, cleaner environment, isn’t exposed to polio while protected my its mother’s antibodies, then it could contract it later on when it doesn’t have the benefit of mother’s antibodies. And if that child grows up without ever being exposed and has a baby, that next generation wouldn’t have a mother’s antibodies to protect them and to help fight the disease. This is why so many babies were stricken and paralyzed.
Fortunately today, we don’t have to go backward to unsanitary conditions to protect ourselves from polio. We have a vaccine that can wiped out this disease. Many countries are polio-free. Many more are being added to that list.
My older siblings have a polio vaccine scar on their upper arm from getting the shot. I’m glad that by the time it was my turn, I got the sugar cube oral version.
Mmmm…
COMING SOON
THE WIDOW'S PLIGHT ~ A sweet historical romance that will tug at your heart. This is book 1 in the Quilting Circle series. Releases in ebook July 1 and in paperback mid-June.Washington State, 1893
When Lily Lexington Bremmer arrives in Kamola with her young son, she’s reluctant to join the social center of her new community, the quilting circle, but the friendly ladies pull her in. She begins piecing a sunshine and shadows quilt because it mirrors her life. She has a secret that lurks in the shadows and hopes it doesn’t come out into the light. Dark places in her past are best forgotten, but her new life is full of sunshine. Will her secrets cast shadows on her bright future?
Widower Edric Hammond and his father are doing their best to raise his two young daughters. He meets Lily and her son when they arrive in town and helps her find a job and a place to live. Lily resists Edric’s charms at first but finds herself falling in love with this kind, gentle man and his two darling daughters. Lily has stolen his heart with her first warm smile, but he’s cautious about bringing another woman into his girls’ lives due to the harshness of their own mother.
Can Edric forgive Lily her past to take hold of a promising chance at love?
“Holly & Ivy,”my #HistoricalRomance novella in A BOUQUET OF BRIDES COLLECTION, takes place in 1890, in Washington State. It’s about a young woman who accompanies her impetuous younger sister on her trip across the country to be a Christmas mail-order bride and is helped by a gallant stranger. #BouquetOfBrides
A doctor or an Amish wife? She can choose to be only one…Kathleen Yoder comes home after fourteen years in the Englisher world. Practicing medicine means sacrifice—no Amish man will want a doctor for a wife. Widowed Noah Lambright offers a cottage as her new clinic, seeing how much Kathleen’s skills can help their community. But as their friendship deepens, could love and family become more than a forbidden dream?
#ChristianRomance #HistoricalRomance #Romance
MARY DAVIS is a bestselling, award-winning novelist of over two dozen titles in both historical and contemporary themes. She has five titles releasing in 2018; "Holly & Ivy" in A Bouquet of Brides Collection in January, Courting Her Amish Heart in March, The Widow’s Plight in July, Courting Her Secret Heart September, & “Zola’s Cross-Country Adventure” in MISSAdventure Brides Collection in December. She is a member of ACFW and active in critique groups.
Mary lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband of over thirty-three years and two cats. She has three adult children and one incredibly adorable grandchild. Find her online at:
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