The success of the polio vaccine was a remarkable breakthrough for medical science effectively
eradicating a dreaded childhood disease. It was also the largest medical experiment to use
American schoolchildren. Richard J. Altenbaugh examines an uneasy conundrum in the history of
vaccination: even as vaccines greatly mitigate the harm that infectious disease causes children
the process of developing these vaccines put children at great risk as research subjects. In
the first half of the twentieth century in the face of widespread resistance to vaccines
public health officials gradually medicalized American culture through mass media public
health campaigns and the public education system. Schools supplied tens of thousands of young
human subjects to researchers school buildings became the main dispensaries of the polio
antigen and the mass immunization campaign that followed changed American public health policy
in profound ways. Tapping links between bioethics education public health and medical
research this book raises fundamental questions about child welfare and the tension between
private and public responsibility that still fuel anxieties around vaccination today.
