Today as stories of the spread of disease and attempts to stop it are filling the media, a look at the 1916 polio epidemic might give us some insight as to how government and people react to an unseen killer.

The outbreak of infantile paralysis, as polio was known, began in Brooklyn in mid-June. The first report in the Asbury Park Press of July 6 describes early efforts to contain the disease, by “municipal and state governments in their campaign against infantile paralysis, the dread disease…