he summer of 1952 was hot, even by Texas standards: 25 days above 100F (38C), the "cool" days not much cooler. But across the state, swimming pools were shut. Cinemas, too, and bars and bowling alleys. Church services were suspended. Cities doused their streets with DDT insecticide; by now, health officials knew that mosquitoes didn't spread the disease, but they had to be seen to be doing something. Nothing seemed to work. As the summer wore on, the numbers of polio cases grew.
One day in July, in a quiet Dallas suburb, a six-year-old boy named Paul Alexander was playing outside in the summer rain. He didn't feel well – his neck hurt, his head pounded. Leaving his muddy shoes in the yard, he walked barefoot into the kitchen, letting the screen door slam behind him. When his mother looked up at his feverish face, she gasped. She made him run out and grab his shoes, then ordered him to bed.
Paul spent the first day in his parents' bed, filling in Roy Rogers colouring books. But even as his fever soared and aching pains blossomed in his limbs, the family doctor advised his parents not to take him to hospital. It was clear that he had polio, but there were just too many patients there, the doctor said. Paul had a better chance of recovering at home.
Over the next few days, the boy's condition worsened. Five days after he had walked into the kitchen barefoot, Paul could no longer hold a crayon, speak, swallow or cough. His parents rushed him to Parkland hospital. Though the staff were well trained and there was a dedicated polio ward, the hospital was overwhelmed. There were sick children everywhere, and nowhere to treat them all. Paul's mother held him in her arms and waited.
When the boy was finally seen by a doctor, his mother was told that there was nothing to be done for him. Paul was left on a gurney in a hallway, barely breathing. He would have died had another doctor not decided to examine him again. This second doctor picked him up, ran with him to the operating theatre and performed an emergency tracheotomy to suction out the congestion in his lungs that his paralysed body couldn't shift.
Three days later, Paul woke up. His body was encased in a machine that wheezed and sighed. He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. He couldn't cough. He couldn't see through the fogged windows of the steam tent – a vinyl hood that kept the air around his head moist and the mucus in his lungs loose. He thought he was dead.
When the tent was eventually removed, all he could see were the heads of other children, their bodies encased in metal canisters, nurses in starched white uniforms and caps floating between them. "As far as you can see, rows and rows of iron lungs. Full of children," he recalled recently.
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The next 18 months were torture. Although he couldn't talk because of the tracheotomy, he could hear the cries of other children in pain. He lay for hours in his own waste because he couldn't tell the staff he needed to be cleaned. He nearly drowned in his own mucus. His parents visited almost every day, but his existence was unrelentingly boring. He and the other children tried to communicate, making faces at each other, but, Paul said: "Every time I'd make a friend, they'd die."
