A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors

by TonyGould (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $4.67

  This work is a comprehensive account of the poliomyelitis epidemic. It combines several strands - biographical, political and social, as well as clinical and microbiological - and focuses on those individuals who were influential in the treatment and conquest of polio.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1995

  $4.20

  This work is a comprehensive account of the poliomyelitis epidemic. It takes the story from the first major outbreak of Infantile Paralysis in New York in 1916 - which induced panic on a scale reminiscent of the great plagues of history - through to its lingering aftermath in the shape of the so-called, and still mysterious Post-Polio Syndrome. This account combines several strands - biographical, political and social - as well as clinical and microbiological. It focuses on those individuals who were influential in the treatment and conquest of polio - from the most celebrated polio sufferer of all, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who set up his own hydrotherapy centre at Warm Springs in Georgia - to the scientific rivals, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, caught up in the race to produce a viable vaccine. The story also features John Enders, the Nobel prizewinner who made the crucial breakthrough in the laboratory; FDR's lieutenant, Basil O'Connor, whose March of Dimes became a byword for successful fund-raising; and Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the nurse from the Australian outback who challenged medical orthodoxy and invented miracle cures. In Britain, despite ten years of increasingly severe outbreaks, it took the death from bulbar polio in 1959 of an international footballer, Jeff Hall, to etch the importance of polio prevention on people's minds. The second part of this book examines the experiences of polio survivors on both sides of the Atlantic and concludes with a moving autobiographical account of the disease and resulting disability.