The Cushing/Whitney Medical Historical Library recently installed a new exhibit in the main reading room featuring Ms Coll 85, the Polly Luckett Murray Papers. Mary “Polly” Luckett Murray (1934-2019) was an artist and resident of Lyme, Connecticut whose medical activism prompted the investigation that identified Lyme disease. The collection documents Murray’s data collection; research into medical conditions with symptoms that present with Lyme disease infection; communications with the Connecticut State Department of Health and Dr. Allen C. Steere of the Department of Rheumatology at Yale University School of Medicine; writing The Widening Circle; and work to raise public awareness of Lyme disease through organizations, conferences, and events.
Polly Murray moved to a home on the edge of the woods in Lyme Connecticut in 1959 where she lived with her husband Gil and their children Sandy, David, Wendy, and Todd. She and her family frequently suffered from a variety of disorders including rashes, fevers, headaches, muscle paralysis, and inflammation, swelling and stiffness of joints, which seemed to respond to treatment with antibiotics, but tended to recur. When the family’s medical care providers denied the possibility of a common cause for these ailments, Murray began to document her family’s medical history and the incidence of similar symptoms in the community. She also conducted extensive research of recent medical literature to identify diseases with symptoms that matched the data she had gathered.
In October 1975 Murray contacted the Connecticut State Board of Health to report on the symptoms experienced by her family and the unusually high rate of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in the Lyme area. In November of 1975 she attended an appointment at the Yale School of Medicine Department of Rheumatology, where she met with Allen Steere and gave him a copy of her family’s medical history and case study information she had collected from Lyme and the surrounding community. Steere became the principal investigator of Lyme disease research at Yale. Lyme arthritis was recognized as a distinct medical condition in 1976, the idea that ticks were the means of transmission followed soon after, and the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium that causes Lyme disease was identified in a tick collected on Long Island, New York in 1981.
Following the identification of Lyme disease, Murray worked with multiple organizations, medical professionals, and government officials to raise public awareness of the disease. She corresponded with researchers, lectured medical students at Case Western Reserve University and Columbia University, and was invited to participate in numerous conferences in the United States and Europe. In 1988 the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease/National Institute of Arthritis Musculoskeletal Diseases gave Murray an award for bringing Lyme disease to the attention of the medical community.
Murray was also deeply involved in Lyme disease support groups and foundations in several states including the Arthritis Foundation Task Force on Lyme Disease, the American Lyme Disease Foundation, and the Lyme Borreliosis Foundation. In 1996, she published an autobiographical account of her experiences with Lyme disease in The Widening Circle: A Lyme Disease Pioneer Tells Her Story (St. Martin’s Press). Murray continued her Lyme disease advocacy work until shortly before her death in 2019.
The Polly Luckett Murray Papers are open for research and a guide to materials in the collection may be viewed in Archives at Yale. The exhibit, curated by Medical Historical Library Archivist Katherine Isham, will be on view in the Medical Historical Library reading room through June 2026.