Reconsidering the Dramaturgy.

This essay reconsiders epidemic narratives through the lens of polio to examine temporal shifts and overlapping and conflicting temporalities and assess some of the stakes in how we conceptualize the epidemic dramaturgy. I argue that while the dramaturgy of epidemics serves as a thread around which people, state actors, and institutions organize experiences, responses, and expectations, consideration of the multiplicity of epidemic temporalities is crucial in understanding how medical practice and knowledge are shaped and transferred, particularly with attention to actors that might be rendered invisible by the conventional narrative arc.

Socialist Utopia in Practice: Everyday Life and Medical Authority in a Hungarian Polio Hospital.

Based on oral history interviews, medical literature, hospital newsletters, memoirs and news media, this article explores the ways in which ideals of socialism interacted with medical practice in polio care in 1950s Hungary. Through the everyday life of polio hospitals, it argues that the specific care that polio demanded from hospital staff, parents and children, resonated with state socialist political discourses of gender equality and the breakdown of class barriers and conventional hierarchies in medicine. Providing opportunities, as much as failing to fulfil expectations of patients, parents and medical staff, polio care simultaneously created socialist utopias and demonstrated the limits of political ideals.

Between East and West: polio vaccination across the Iron Curtain in Cold War Hungary.

In 1950s Hungary, with an economy and infrastructure still devastated from World War II and facing further hardships, thousands of children became permanently disabled and many died in the severe polio epidemic that shook the globe. The relatively new communist regime invested significantly in solving the public health crisis, initially importing a vaccine from the West and later turning to the East for a new solution. Through the history of polio vaccination in Hungary, this article shows how Cold War politics shaped vaccine evaluation and implementation in the 1950s.