David Bodian (15 May 1910 – 18 September 1992) was an American medical scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who worked in polio research.

With his understanding of the disease, he made a series of crucial discoveries that paved the way for the final development of a vaccine by Jonas Salk and later by Albert Sabin.

[2][4] He was under the supervision of Charles Judson Herrick, Norman Hoer and George William Bartelmez while working on his thesis project on the visual pathways of the opossum.

[5] In the following year of 1938, Bodian spent a few months at the University of Michigan as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow under the direction of Elizabeth Crosby.

[1] In 1938, Bodian was offered a fellowship in the Department of Anatomy at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to join Howard A. Howe to study polio in monkeys.

[2] In 1940, Bodian served an interim period of a few months as an assistant professor of anatomy at the Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.

When the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis awarded funding to the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health to support research on polio, Bodian returned to Hopkins, and he and Howe joined the School of Hygiene and Public Health to continue their research in 1942.

[4] In 1935, while researching the visual pathways of the opossum, Bodian developed a method of staining nerve cells in paraffin using silver proteinate or Protargol with gold and other fixing agents.

Through these adjustments, Bodian was able to study the structure of the synapses of the goldfish and catfish and the nervous systems of frogs, rattlesnakes, and crayfish.

[11] Their publication on the "Differentiation of Types of Poliomyelitis Viruses," in the American Journal of Hygiene in 1949[11] became a milestone in the development of new polio vaccine methods.

[1] In 1980, the Johns Hopkins University dedicated the Bodian Room in the School of Medicine in recognition of his contributions to polio research.