A Note on the Early History of Infantile Paralysis in the United States *

Summaries of the early history of poliomyelitis may be found in articles by Hutchins8 and by Ruhriah and Mayer"4. Consequently, details of this story, which emanates almost entirely from European sources, will not be reviewed here except as they concern one scanty observation on the disease in this country during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is generally agreed that the English physician, or pediatrician, Michael Underwood, was responsible for the first clinical description of poliomyelitis which has been discovered in medical writings. It is found in his Text-book on Diseases of Children. Here a somewhat doubtful account appears in the earlier editions, notably that of 1793, to be amplified and improved in another section of the fourth English edition of 1799, and in subsequent editions. The condition to which Underwood referred in these articles is probably poliomyelitis, but it is not a graphic description of the disease. It implies that the types of paralysis which the author had seen arose from a number of causes, including "teething, or foul bowels, . . ." Other probable accounts of poliomyelitis can be extracted (though with some difficulty) from the works of Shaw"5 and Abercrombie' in England, in 1 823 and 1 828 respectively, but what seems to be a far better description is that of Monteggia"2 in Italy in 1829. He believed he was dealing with a special kind of paralysis of children initiated by fever of two or three days' duration. In 1836 (four years before Heine's epochal work) Badham's' report appeared, in which four cases were accurately described. They occurred during the summer of 1835 in the small community of Worksop, England, and represent the earliest group of recognized epidemic cases. Badham's paper prompted Heine, an orthopedist of Cannstadt, Germany, to report his own experiences with a larger number of cases in a monograph7 published in 1840. It may suffice to say that he gave an excellent clinical analysis of the disease, pointing out that the symptoms indi-