A Healthy Spoonful

Everyone knows that Mary Poppins was magical, but less well known is how the famed Disney nanny helped eradicate polio in the U.S. with her song, “A Spoonful of Sugar.”

One of the most sugary and enduring movie songs ever, “Spoonful” grew out of a father’s conversation with his young son about getting the polio vaccine.

In the early 1960s, songwriter Robert Sherman’s son, Jeffrey, was telling his dad about getting the immunization at school. It didn’t hurt, Jeffrey reassured his father. “They put it on a sugar cube and you just ate it,” he recalled in 2020. “He stared at me, then went to the phone and called my uncle Dick.”

The result was one of the many signature tunes by Robert and Richard Sherman in the 1964 Disney movie, “Mary Poppins,” starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke.

For centuries, polio had been a serious, uncurable and sometimes fatal, viral epidemic before Jonas Salk created a vaccine in 1955, delivered as an injection. Albert Sabin made the oral version that kids took in schools beginning in the 1960s. Polio was eradicated in the U.S. by 1980, thanks in part to a magical, sweet song.

—Ted Pease