This disease first became known when a young girl had been taken to a hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, with what seemed to be a case of the rabies. Later on, after she had passed away, it was discovered that the illness was not rabies, but in fact it was polio (Explore).
Back then, the medicals didn’t know whether or not the disease was contagious, …show more content…
Since 1947, Dr. Andrew J. Rhodes had been leading a large-scale polio research program at Connaught Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Toronto. By the year 1951, poliovirus was being developed in test tubes, however there wasn’t enough being produced to be sustainable for a vaccine prior to Dr. Arthur E. Franklin’s suggestion of “Medium 199.” Dr. Joseph F. Morgan, the original creator of the nutrient base, was a close friend of Franklin’s, and after addressing the problems with the growth of the poliovirus, game some "199" to Franklin during 1951 (The Story of Polio), which proved to be quite helpful.
At the same time, Dr. Salk was confident in a vaccine that was inactive that could prevent the polio disease in human beings, just as it had in monkeys. His vaccination, however, had not yet been tested on humans because it wasn’t exactly safe, and in addition, even if the vaccine was successful, he could not simply create millions of them for all of the contaminated humans in the world. Morgan’s nutrient base, Medium 199, supplied a chemically pure ground for a safe vaccine, and as soon as Salk heard about its value, he was fully convinced that he could prepare a vaccine that would be safe to try on