Infantile Paralysis

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 29, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 47.

Infantile Paralysis

Infantile Paralysis.—John B. Huber, M.D., in the November Review of Reviews tells us that infantile paralysis is a menace. There was an outbreak in New Orleans in 1841, "but it was otherwise not especially noted until the beginning of the present century." But since 1903 there have been several epidemics. The disease is infectious. It is thus described by Doctors Chapin and Pisch: "An acute inflammatory process taking place in the anterior horns of the spinal cord, accompanied by a sudden and complete paralysis of various groups of voluntary muscles, followed by a rapid wasting of the affected muscles." Eight to fifteen per cent of the patients die, and seventy-five per cent of those who survive are more or less crippled for life. The scientific term for the disease is "poliomyelitis," from polio, gray, myel, marrow, itis, inflammation,—a name given when the substance of the spinal cord was supposed to be marrow.