Donald Elzinga Oral History Interview, 1997

Donald Elzinga discusses polio symptoms, polio epidemics in the Upper Peninsula from the 1930s to the 1950s and why they were disproportionately worse, community fear of the disease, treatments, the mortality rate, the March of Dimes, public health efforts related to polio, the Salk and Sabin vaccines, post-polio syndrome, and attempts to eradicate the disease globally. He also speaks about his personal connections to the subject: his father's recruitment to be the first orthopedic/polio doctor in the Upper Peninsula in the 1930s, his own fear of polio as a child, treating ongoing polio patients when he became a doctor in the 1960s, and the invention of the "wooden lung" in Marquette County by Lowell and Max Reynolds. He also speaks briefly about the general state of medicine in the Upper Peninsula in the early twentieth century, smallpox, and tuberculosis.