The culprit: the medicine she had been given to cure her. Nine days after her diagnosis, she was dead. Her kidneys shut down, and she lapsed into a coma. In the fall of 1937, Joan Marlar, a 6-year-old girl in Tulsa, Okla., was diagnosed with strep throat and given an elixir containing a wondrous new medicine, sulfanilamide-an antibiotic hailed by Time magazine not long before as “the medical discovery of the decade.” Over the next week, Joan was racked with nausea she became weak and tired. Jonas Salk (1914-1995) and a nurse administer a polio vaccine.
