"In the late spring of 1949 the United States
was in the grip of its worst poliomyelitis
epidemic ever. On June 10 a paper on ways
to save the lives of bulbar polio victims was
read at the Annual Session of the American
Medical Association (subsequently printed
in its journal, JAMA, September 3, 1949,
pages 1-8, volume 141, no. 1). Following the
talk members of the audience were invited to
comment. The first speaker, a leading
authority from Pasadena, focused on details
of tracheotomy techniques caused when
paralyzed breathing, swallowing and
coughing muscles of victims threatened their
lives. Why the next person was recognized is
puzzling. The only national recognition he
had received — and it was obviously very
limited — was that his picture appeared in
Ebony in 1947 for having delivered of a
deaf-mute black woman the first known
surviving, identical quadruplets in the
country. Here is the abstract of his remarks
as recorded in JAMA:
"Dr. F. R. Klenner, Reidsville, N.C.: It
might be interesting to learn how poliomyelitis was treated in Reidsville, N.C.,
during the 1948 epidemic. In the past seven
years, virus infections have been treated and
cured in a period of seventy-two hours by
the employment of massive frequent
injections of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C. I
believe that if vitamin C in these massive
doses — 6,000 to 20,000 mg in a twentyfour hour period — is given to these patients
with poliomyelitis none will be paralyzed
and there will be no further maiming or
epidemics of poliomyelitis."
The discussion period was, of course, to
be devoted to hearing relevant comments of
the world's leading authorities on the
treatment of bulbar polio symptoms, not
1. 1250 Grizzly Peak, Berkeley, CA 94708.
to airing another claim of a cure. One can
imagine the silence that must have greeted
this sweeping, out-of-place declaration by a
small-town general practitioner. Four other
speakers, three more bulbar experts and an
anesthesiologist, followed. None referred to
Dr. Klenner's remarks.
The empirical, clinical basis for Klenner's
statement is found in his paper "The
Treatment of Poliomyelitis and Other Virus
Diseases with Vitamin C", published in the
July 1949 issue of the Journal of Southern
Medicine and Surgery. "
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The Origin of the 42-Year Stonewall of Vitamin C
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"Unlike oral polio vaccination, vitamin C has never caused polio. Yet how many people have you met, physicians included, who know vitamin C has been known to prevent and cure poliomyelitis for nearly 70 years? It was never really a secret. On September 18, 1939, Time magazine reported that "Last week, at the Manhattan meeting of the International Congress for Microbiology, two new clues turned up. (One is) Vitamin C." (9) The article describes how Jungeblut, while studying statistics of the 1938 Australian polio epidemic, deduced that low vitamin C status was associated with the disease."
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