The sugar cube polio vaccine was the inspiration for the song "A Spoonful of Sugar" in the Disney film "Mary Poppins."

'Blind alleys are always opportunities': The scientist who developed the polio vaccine | BBC
by Greg McKevitt
6 Apr. 2026

In the early 1960s, Jeffrey Sherman's father Robert and uncle Richard were working on music for the Disney film Mary Poppins and struggling for ideas. Jeffrey told his father one afternoon how he had received the oral polio vaccine at school that day. "Did it hurt," Robert Sherman asked. "I told him they put it on a sugar cube and you just ate it," Jeffrey Sherman wrote on Facebook. "He stared at me, then went to the phone and called my uncle Dick. They went back to the office and wrote A Spoonful of Sugar (Helps the Medicine Go Down)."