Rutland’s sculpture trail will unveil its newest addition Friday. The 13th statue of the series honors a Rutland doctor who identified the first polio epidemic in the country.
Dr. Charles Caverly was born in 1856 and spent his early life in Pittsford. He had been practicing medicine for barely 10 years when he identified an outbreak of polio in the Rutland area in the summer of 1894.
At the time, sporadic cases of paralysis and related symptoms had been noted in the US and Europe but they weren't typically connected to polio and the illness wasn’t thought to be contagious.
That changed after Caverly did extensive research on the 132 cases reported in Vermont.
Caverly wasn't able to determine what caused the disease, but according to the American Association of Immunologists, his tenacity laid the groundwork for substantial understanding of polio by reaching three important conclusions: "polio had the potential to become an epidemic; most of the victims were children, not infants, thus 'infantile paralysis' was a misnomer; and some victims experienced an extremely mild form of illness with minor symptoms and a quick recovery."
Caverly was president of the Vermont State Board of Health from 1891 to 1918, and besides his polio research he spent much of his career treating another public health scourge, tuberculosis.
Under his direction, the Vermont Sanitarium was established in 1907 in Pittsford and named in his honor. It eventually closed its doors in the 1960s and the site is now used by the Vermont Police Academy
Steve Costello, one of the organizers of Rutland's sculpture trail, says that while Caverly was the first in the world to recognize a polio epidemic and worked hard to fight the spread of tuberculosis, his own life was cut short by another epidemic. Caverly died at age 62 in the influenza pandemic that hit Rutland in 1918.
Italian sculptor Alessandro Lombardo created the marble statue that shows Caverly sitting with a book. It stands at the corner of West and Church streets in Rutland.
Sculpture trail organizers say the statue also pays tribute to the hundreds of local medical professionals who responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
