The Life and Times of Marion Pearl Ayer

Quarantine

Two of the items in the scrapbook are a reminder of the polio epidemic which struck Boston in 1916. Polio, better known at the time as infantile paralysis, is a contagious disease which can cause paralysis of the lower extremities and death; children are particularly vulnerable. Although polio has been around for centuries, the disease only became easily identifiable in 1908, when Austrian physicians Karl Landsteiner and E. Popper discovered the poliomyelitis virus; shortly afterward, in 1909, Massachusetts began officially counting polio cases. In 1916 there was a major outbreak of polio throughout the United States. Attempts were made to control the disease through quarantines; Simmons closed the school and kept the students in their dorms for two weeks in October. Such attempts had little effect, and it was only when Jonas Salk developed a vaccine in the 1950s that polio was finally eradicated in the US.