You Know that Famous Polio Photo with All the Iron Lungs?
That scene was staged for publicity purposes.
I’ve been seeing a lot of headlines popping up about polio these days. Some people are being scared into thinking we might soon experience an epidemic similar to what they “know” happened in the 1940s and 1950s.
I started researching polio about five years ago after reading Dissolving Illusions by Dr. Suzanne Humphries. Eventually I’ll post additional articles about what I’ve learned. For now, however, I just want to make one quick point about this famous photo, which appeared in Life magazine in 1953 and still pops up regularly today.
It does not portray what people have been led to think it does. It is NOT a typical polio ward of the 1950s. Rather, it was a scene staged for publicity purposes. The machines aren’t hooked up or operating.
According to Forrest Maready, author of The Moth in the Iron Lung, the hospital featured in the photo (Rancho Los Amigos) probably never had more than a dozen iron lung machines at any one time. The other twenty-odd machines in this photo were en route from the manufacturer to other hospitals, and were assembled for this publicity photo.
Propaganda was already part of American medicine even back in the 1950s. The yellow block of text below the photo is from a display in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC about how deceptive photography can influence public opinion.
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