During this same period, in 1949, scientists, led by a bacteriologist named John Franklin Enders, developed a method of growing poliomyelitis viruses in a laboratory, leading to Jonas Salk’s successful polio vaccine five years later. That was followed by Albert Sabin’s oral vaccine. Sometimes called “infantile paralysis,” the disabling, often paralyzing disease hit children hardest. In 1952, there were 57,879 new cases of polio reported in the United States. With routine immunization, there would be only a few cases ten years later. In Chapter 24 of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden recalls a speech student at Pencey Prep, a boy named Richard Kinsella, whose consideration of his polio-infected uncle was interesting to Holden but condemned as a “digression” by fellow students and the instructor. Readers in the early 1950s would understand the terror and destruction that polio produced.
