JAKE LEG.(outbreak of paralysis in 1930s)

Dr. John Morgan, a professor at the City University of New York Medical School, likes to call himself a pharmaco-ethnomusicologist. His first love is early-American vernacular music, and his apartment, on the Upper West Side, is stacked with ancient records. Some years back, Morgan was listening to the Allen Brothers' "Jake Walk Blues," released in 1930. In a kazoo-backed Tennessee twang, the brothers sang, "I can't eat, I can't talk, drinking mean jake, Lord, I can't walk."

The lyrics pinballed through Morgan's memory and lit up twice. First was a lecture he'd heard in medical school, in 1961: a professor had mentioned a strange paralysis called "jake walk" that he had observed during his residency in Cincinnati in the thirties. Next was a face from Morgan's childhood in Ohio, that of a legless beggar called Nigger John. Nigger John had had the "jake leg," Morgan recalled his mother telling him. She had said it in a way that discouraged further inquiry.

Stout and bearded, Morgan, who is sixty-three, delicately set the arm of a turntable on a thick, spinning record, and after a moment's hiss we heard what sounded like pure despair. "Ishmon Bracey, one of the Mississippi greats," Morgan whispered. From seven decades back, Bracey wailed, "Jake leg, jake leg, what in the world you trying to do? Seems like everybody in the city's messed up on account of drinking you."

Morgan has collected a number of songs about the jake leg or the jake walk. "From them we learn that some new kind of paralysis appeared in 1930," he said. "No songs mention it before then." He began bending back blunt fingers. "The paralysis was brought on by drinking something called 'jake.' It afflicted enough souls to instigate an entire subset of folk music. Blacks and whites were affected. It rendered men impotent. And it was no longer inspiring musicians by 1934, which meant it was a cataclysmic but discrete event." He sat back and spread his hands. "Behold the study, through folk music, of a substance-induced epidemic," he said. "Pharmaco-ethnomusicology."

Morgan has been researching the jake leg on and off for twenty-seven years. He has put together a CD collection of seventeen tunes mentioning it, including one by Gene Autry, and he has written half a dozen medical-journal articles on the subject. In the nineteen-seventies, he interviewed a number of the epidemic's surviving victims and collected his data, a teeming bazaar of anecdote and chemistry, in a huge manuscript that has been gathering dust for years. He also has a filthy carton full of clippings. With a little prodding, he agreed to turn all the material over to me. "I'm not giving up on the story myself," he said. "I just don't mind someone else telling it, too."

As far as we know, the outbreak was first detected in Oklahoma City, by Ephraim Goldfain, a thirty-four-year-old physician who had emigrated from Romania as a child and had put himself through medical school by operating a streetcar. He was bookishly handsome, with swept-back red hair, a cleft chin, and round horn-rimmed glasses. With a few partners, he ran a thirty-five-bed clinic called the Reconstruction Hospital. On February 27, 1930, a man whose name is lost to history staggered in off the street. The patient's feet dangled like a marionette's, so that walking involved swinging them forward and slapping them onto the floor. He told Goldfain that he had strained himself lifting an automobile, and a couple of days later his calves had begun to tingle. Then his legs went useless below the knee. He wasn't in any pain, he said, but he could barely get around.

Sudden paralysis in those days usually meant polio, but to Goldfain, who recounted the patient's history in a medical journal, this didn't look like polio. He didn't pay much attention to the story about lifting the car. Goldfain thought the man's symptoms suggested lead poisoning. He ordered blood and spinal-fluid tests. They came back negative.