Richard Mulvaney, 88; inaugurated the polio vaccine

Richard Joseph Mulvaney, a Virginia physician who was the first doctor in the nation to give children the Salk polio vaccine, which virtually ended the crippling disease in the United States, died Oct. 26 of congestive heart failure at a hospital in Fairfax, Va. He was 88.

Mulvaney, the first general practitioner in McLean, Va., conducted the field test of the vaccine after health departments in other jurisdictions shied away from the trial, intimidated by opposition from the influential broadcaster Walter Winchell.

“I remember walking in and not realizing what a tremendous thing it was until I stepped over radio wires and TV wires. I remember kids standing off to the side looking worried and screaming,” he said in 2004.

The disease, almost unimaginable today, struck in early summer, sometimes crippling or killing its victims. In 1952, a particularly bad year, 57,628 new cases of polio were reported.

When Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh developed an effective killed-virus version of the vaccine, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes) chose Thomas Francis Jr. at the University of Michigan to implement the first mass polio vaccine trial in 1954.

Mulvaney was the first of the volunteers to begin carrying out the work.

His first patient was 6-year-old Randy Kerr of Falls Church, Va., a gritty youngster with poison ivy who had begged his parents to let him be the first to get the shot. A photo of Randy’s April 26, 1954, inoculation was sent over news wires to papers nationwide. The picture still turns up in old World Book encyclopedias, on the March of Dimes website and in a Smithsonian Institution exhibit on the history of polio.

By 1955, the number of new polio cases had dropped to 29,270. The oral vaccine, developed by Albert Sabin, was licensed in 1962, and polio became a disease of the past, at least in the U.S., which saw its last wild virus in 1979.

“It hit thousands of kids and adults, paralyzed some of them and destined them to live lives confined to an iron lung,” Mulvaney said in 1997.

“So when this vaccine came out, people were overjoyed. This was wonderful because instead of having thousands of cases every year, there were practically none.”

Mulvaney continued to practice in McLean until 1974, when he shut his office and became an emergency room physician at what was then Fairfax Hospital. He retired in 1987.

Born in Casper, Wyo., Mulvaney graduated from Loyola University in Chicago. He received a medical degree from Georgetown University in 1948 and served in the Army Medical Corps in Korea during the Korean War. He was awarded a Bronze Star.

He settled in McLean and, with his wife at the front desk, built a medical practice out of making house calls, delivering babies and treating the ordinary illnesses of a growing population.

His wife of 56 years, Jeanne Mulvaney, died last year.

Survivors include seven children, 15 grandchildren, one great-grandson and two sisters.

Mulvaney participated in the 50th-anniversary celebration of the Salk vaccine in 2004 at Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, where he met sixth-graders just learning about poliomyelitis. One noted that his grandfather had had the disease, but the child didn’t know how serious it had been.

Mulvaney regarded the student, then replied: “You don’t have any idea how lucky you are.”