A Social History of Polio Vaccination in Australia, 1950s to 1970s

PhD in History, University of Newcastle Australia

This PhD research will be part of a larger Australian Research Council funded project about polio’s history in Australia between 1950 and 1970: a pivotal period of serious outbreaks, and the introduction of vaccines. The project is led by Professor Catharine Coleborne and will include an examination of oral history collections, polio memories, stories of regional Australia, and the introduction of vaccines. It also has a digital mapping component. The doctoral student in this project will have co-supervision from a member of the history academic staff and/or another expert from public health, medicine, or Indigenous research.

The PhD student will be able to attend conferences, co-publish one article with the lead supervisor, participate in a small research team and contribute ideas to public engagement. Previous experience in social histories of health and medicine is highly desirable and strongly preferred. Archival research capability is required, with some archives located in Canberra and other sites. Being based in Newcastle or Sydney Australia is preferable. The PhD student will have opportunities to shape the project and learn about digital mapping as part of their work if they are willing. The student must be capable of distinguishing their project from the research overall but will be able to scope their original research within the framework of the funded program.

This project seeks to research, locate and reveal peoples’ experiences of polio to link personal accounts to the meta-narrative of health and illness at the national level. Through a combination of extant personal oral stories and archival sources, together with new digital humanities representations of data about infection and vaccination rates, this research promises to produce amulti-dimensional understanding of polio’s history through a combined articulation of public memory, official medical knowledge, and social welfare organisations dedicated to family care and support.

The project focuses on the period 1950 to 1970 to reflect the most impactful outbreaks of pandemic polio infection and their aftermath as defined by a leading historian of public health (Milton Lewis 2003, 38). Australia had a higher median incidence of polio per 100,000 people in the population than both the United States and the United Kingdom across the twentieth century based on World Health Organisation data published in 1954 (see Highley 2015, 178; Oshinsky 2005, 130), with many thousands affected during serious outbreaks in the mid 1950s until the targeted introduction of the Salk vaccine from 1955, and Sabin Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) in 1966.

The story of polio has largely been hidden from national narratives of Australian life in the postwar period, with few scholarly histories of the Australian experience of the most significant polio outbreaks of the mid-twentieth century. Surprisingly, there are no in-depth studies of the social acceptance of the polio vaccine in Australia. This project will investigate the relative scholarly silence surrounding polio and ask new questions about the stigma associated with the disease.