Polio Across the Iron Curtain
Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic

Through the lens of polio, Dóra Vargha looks anew at international health, communism and Cold War politics. This title is also available as Open Access.

Dóra Vargha (Author)

9781108420846, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 November 2018

320 pages, 8 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.57 kg

Advance praise: 'Polio Across the Iron Curtain is a superb study of the significance of disability for state and nation. Vargha's excellent history of Cold War medicine, technology, and public health reveals interstitial sites of cooperation and exchange in the shadow of the superpowers, thereby offering an important rethinking of the history of global health.' Julie Livingston, New York University

By the end of the 1950s, Hungary became an unlikely leader in what we now call global health. Only three years after Soviet tanks crushed the revolution of 1956, Hungary became one of the first countries to introduce the Sabin vaccine into its national vaccination programme. This immunization campaign was built on years of scientific collaboration between East and West, in which scientists, specimens, vaccines and iron lungs crossed over the Iron Curtain. Dóra Vargha uses a series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to understand the response to a global public health emergency in the midst of the Cold War. She argues that despite the antagonistic international atmosphere of the 1950s, spaces of transnational corporation between blocs emerged to tackle a common health crisis. At the same time, she shows that epidemic concepts and policies were influenced by the very Cold War rhetoric that medical and political cooperation transcended. This title is also available as Open Access.

Introduction
1. The power of polio
2. Iron Curtain, iron lungs
3. Unlikely allies
4. Local failure in a global success
5. Sabin saves the day
6. After the end of polio
Conclusion: Eastern Europe in global health history.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX], European history [HBJD]