The recent death of FC Robbins¹, Nobel laureate and pioneer worker who cultivated the poliomyelitis virus, prompts this note. Poliomyelitis pre-dates recorded history.² Biblical descriptions of the lame and crippled lack sufficient detail for diagnosis. However, a funereal stele of the priest Ruma from the 19th Egyptian dynasty shows shortening and marked wasting of his right leg; he walks on his toes and uses a stick³; this has been attributed to poliomyelitis.⁴ Frequent 18th century epidemics allowed a British doctor, Michael Underwood, to describe poliomyelitis as an entity in 1789, referring to a “debility of the lower extremities in children”⁵ John Badham described an acute paralysis suggestive of poliomyelitis in four children in 1835.⁶

Little more was written until Jacob von Heine published a 78 page monograph in 1840, which recognised poliomyelitis …