Dancing in my Dreams

Across most of the world, an entire generation has lived free from the spectre of polio, but for fifty years during the twentieth century that fear was overwhelming. Polio became every parent’s worst nightmare, and panic drove people to do bizarre things to protect their children. Survivors of the disease and treatment often found that they faced a world unfriendly to their disability. In pre-Second World War Australia, how best to treat polio survivors was fiercely debated and generated a rift between the medical community and those advocating alternative therapies. Two women symbolised this rift. In Victoria, Dr Jean Macnamara used splints, plaster casts and braces to immobilise patients, an approach that, by the 1950s, most Western countries had abandoned. In her clinics in Australia, and later in the United States, Sister Elizabeth Kenny championed and practised a different approach involving little or no constraint on the paralysed body, the application of gentle exercise of the muscles in the early, acute stage of the disease, and the use of hot packs to relieve pain and muscle spasm and tightness. Dancing in My Dreams describes the disease of polio and its treatment, the scientific endeavour that led to the discovery of the poliovirus, and the studies in virology and immunology that culminated in the production of a polio vaccine. It highlights the experiences of patients and the voices of survivors, revealing how ethnicity, class, age and gender all mediated individual’s reactions to the disease, which included fear, rejection, denial and anger. Despite the vaccination programs initiated by the World Health Organization, the polio­virus has not been eliminated globally. In three countries, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the wild poliovirus remains endemic. The striking 50-year decline in the incidence of polio has stalled, leading to falling levels of immunity in populations. As the frequency of polio epidemics has declined, so too has the collective memory of the experience of the disease, with the growth of anti-vaccine sentiment in many societies a complicating issue. There is no cure for polio. The treatment for polio today remains the same as it was forty years ago. The only way to prevent future epidemics of polio is by vaccinating the population. If the poliovirus cannot find an unvaccinated individual to infect, it will die out. But the success of a vaccination program depends on the cooperation of all individuals to ensure the common good. As long as a single person remains infected with polio, all unvaccinated children throughout the world are at risk.