Armstrong – Table of Contents

tissue high up in the nasal passages. He infected monkeys by intracerebral passage and
later recovered poliovirus from the nose after the monkeys became paralyzed. He
postulated that polio gained entrance to the brain by way of the exposed nasal nerve
endings (olfactory nerve) and followed the nerve to the brain. Later the reverse occurred
and the virus reappeared in the nose where it could be a source of infection to other
persons. Later investigators in the 1930s and 1940s (see below) found that the portal of
entry was through the fecal-oral route and that a viremia originating from the infected
alimentary tract invaded the central nervous system to produce the neurological
manifestations of poliomyelitis.
Polio epidemics appeared annually unabated. The worst epidemic in the United
States on record, shortly after research efforts and accurate record keeping began,
occurred in New York City in 1916 with over 9000 cases. The public health officials
were at a loss to recommend control measures to prevent spread since so little was known
about how polio spread. Attempts to treat patients with intraspinal injections of serum
from patients who had recovered provided no definite results but were generally deemed
useless.
In the summer of 1921, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, scion of an upper Hudson
River Valley patrician family, educated at Harvard College and Columbia Law School,
former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate in 1920,
lawyer in a prestigious New York City law firm and a rising, popular, political figure,
took his wife and children to the family retreat on Campobello Island to remove them
from New York City in order to remove them from the current outbreak of poliomyelitis.
Campobello Island, Canada is located in the Bay of Fundy close to and off the northeast