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How the Roanoke community handled the arrival of polio in 1950.
W. H. Hoobler knew what was coming to Roanoke: polio.
Hoobler was the administrator for the largest hospital in Western Virginia and the epicenter of care for polio victims in the region. Trustees of Roanoke Hospital had changed the name to Memorial and Crippled Children’s Hospital in 1949 to reflect the increasing role the hospital was playing in treating polio. By the end of January 1951, Hobbler reported staggering numbers.
Between July 1, 1950, and January 28, 1951, Memorial and Crippled Children’s Hospital had received 450 polio patients mostly from the rural counties in Southwestern Virginia. The national “hot spot” for polio was Wytheville that had a per capita rate seventy times that of the nation.
So prominent was the town’s infection rate, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis flew its executive director into Roanoke, who then drove to Wytheville, to launch the nationwide 1951 “March of Dimes” campaign with a live coast-to-coast radio broadcast from the town on January 14. Patients from Wytheville and Wythe County accounted for 169 of the hospital’s cases.
Overrun with polio patients, Hoobler had cleared the entire first floor of Memorial and Crippled Children’s Hospital to serve as a polio ward, and more beds were needed. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis funded specialists to assist Roanoke’s physicians. Doctors M.K. Johnson, Thomas Porterfield, Harry Cox, Herman Gailey and Lloyd Crawford were pediatric and orthopedic specialists that had come from as far away as New York. Hoobler and the local chapters of the Red Cross and March of Dimes had appealed for more nurses. Student nurses were pressed into service, and those from out of town were housed at the YWCA.
When a polio patient was admitted, the prognosis was often not optimistic. Of the 450 patients referenced in Hoobler’s report, slightly more than one-fourth had some form of paralysis. One in ten required an iron lung, and of those half died. The vast majority of patients were children.
Complicating the situation was the lack of information regarding the cause of polio. By the late 1940s, a leading theory was that the disease was transmitted by flies and mosquitoes. Roanoke had done what hundreds of other communities throughout the nation had done in relying upon that theory to literally hose down alleys, streets, playgrounds and stream beds with the highly toxic pesticide DDT. In Roanoke and Roanoke County this was done on several occasions with photos appearing in local newspapers of playground equipment being washed in DDT.
Polio took six to twenty days to incubate and remained contagious for up to two weeks. It had flu-like symptoms such as sore throat, fatigue, muscle stiffness, headache, and stomach pains. Given its incubation period, success at contract tracing was sporadic at best, and with no known cause almost futile.
In Wythe County leaders closed schools and canceled events, and Wytheville’s baseball team pulled out of its farm league for the 1950 season. Signs were posted on the main highway through town advising visitors not to stop, even for gas, but to keep driving.
As for the Roanoke Valley, Hoobler anticipated the worst was to come. And it did. For the six-month period that was the basis for his report in February 1951, Roanoke and Roanoke County had a combined polio victim count of slightly more than thirty. He and physicians spoke to local civic and business organizations about treatment and prevention, but with a relatively low per capita polio rate life in the Roanoke Valley continued as normal in 1951. That eventually changed.
Dr. Louis Ripley recalled years later those months in 1950. “It was awful. Whole floors of the hospital were full of patients.”
During the late summer of that year nearly half the patients admitted to the hospital had polio. At times, cars lined the road in front of the hospital bringing the afflicted from Southwestern Virginia. According to Ripley, “There was little we could do.”
Frequent power outages at the hospital meant orderlies, cooks, secretaries and others rushed to the polio wards to help nurses and doctors hand pump the iron lungs.
The hospital received tremendous community support. The Roanoke Life Saving and First Aid Crew under the direction of Julian Stanley Wise provided several iron lungs. The Norfolk & Western Railway outfitted freight cars for the transport of iron lung patients, usually to Children’s Hospital in Richmond. The Society for the Crippled of Southwestern Virginia provided field clinics for follow-up once patients were released for home care.
Only in 1957 when the Salk vaccine arrived did polio abate. Between 1951 and 1957, Memorial and Crippled Children’s Hospital handled varying levels of polio admissions, but no year was greater than 1950. The last case of infantile paralysis to be treated at the hospital was in 1962.
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