Iron Curtain, iron lungs: Governing polio in Cold War Hungary 1952--1963

Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs uses the series of polio epidemics in communist Hungary to study a global public health emergency in the midst of an international political crisis: the Cold War. Based on extensive, thus far unexplored archival material, medical and popular literature, newspapers, audiovisual sources, memoirs and oral history interviews, the dissertation argues that due to the particularities of polio, unique spaces of cooperation opened between antagonistic sides while Cold War concepts simultaneously influenced policies and practices of disease prevention and treatment. Polio became an issue that reached over Cold War divisions, due to four attributes of the disease: the new phenomenon of epidemic polio in the 20th century; the importance of children as the main age group of the disease; the debilitating effects of the virus; and that polio was a global disease.;The dissertation analyses the history of polio in Hungary at multiple registers. On an international level, it asks how Cold War divisions can be re-evaluated when viewed through the lens of a disease that disregarded borders and ideologies. On a national level, the dissertation investigates how post-war societies and nascent political systems dealt with an epidemic that worked against their modernist projects. On an individual level, it raises questions about definitions of treatment, authority of care and investigates the boundary between professional and lay knowledge.;Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs presents a new approach both to Cold War history and to the history of medicine. The dissertation shifts attention from the two superpowers to an Eastern European state and by doing so, throws new light on Cold War interactions and the effect of international politics on personal experiences. The unique geopolitical situation of Hungary on the boundary of the Iron Curtain and the construction of a new communist regime makes the country the ideal ground to understand the influence of Cold War in forming global health responses to epidemic crises. With vaccine first arriving from the West, followed by a new serum from the East, the Hungarian story highlights issues of international politics, experimentation and standardization in epidemic prevention. Furthermore, a focus on Hungary allows linking the intimate world of families with national and international agendas through the care for disabled children with polio.