In this touching personal story, Larry Cuban tells the story of polio–also known as infantile paralysis–which was a scourge for decades. Many children died of the dread disease, and some were left paralyzed or partially paralyzed. Even adults were afflicted. Larry came down with polio and still has memories of his hospitalization and the treatments his parents administered to bring him back to health. He loathed the two raw eggs that he was required to drink every morning to aid in his recovery but remembers his mother rubbing his legs with cocoa butter to ease the pain.
In the U.S. it occurred periodically paralyzing children and adults, rich and poor alike. One epidemic in 1916 claimed 27,000 Americans. In New York alone there were 8400 cases and 2400 deaths. Five years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came down with the disease at the age of 39 and wore leg braces for the rest of his life including the years he served as President of the U.S. (1933-1945). Not until the early 1950s did a vaccine become available for children.**
I wrote a post recently about Jonas Salk, who discovered the vaccine for polio in 1954. What a relief that was! I was in tenth grade then and remember how the specter of polio hung over my youthful years. I remember all the warnings about avoiding public spaces, taking extra care not to have any contact with anyone who might be infected, taking care not to touch any surface that might harbor the germ. Unlike Larry, I was lucky enough to have avoided that terrible disease.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I can recall going to my elementary school, standing in a line with my mother in order to get the polio vaccine in the ’50s. My neighbor was not so lucky. Six years older than I, he was a polio victim. He spent his entire life in a wheelchair. The polio vaccine ensured that so many other children would be spared from a similar fate.
I was a sophomore in high school when the vaccine was released. My childhood was shadowed by anxiety about polio.
The problem with people today, is that most people born 1970 on, have never experienced or seen the hardships of a true health emergency. They are privileged to have herd immunity. I was born mid 60’s and experienced mumps and chicken pox. My older siblings (10/11 yrs older) experienced the woe of measles along with mumps and chicken pox. As a child, I remember seeing lots of middle aged and older folks wearing leg braces and remember my mother telling me that it was from polio. If a family came down with measles, the Dr. came to your house, gave some medication and instructions (keep your child in a dark room or they can become blind!) and posted a yellow quarantine sign on your door. Your neighbors or the grocer/milkman/egg man would leave your food on the front porch and the policeman walking/riding his beat would make sure that you didn’t leave your house. People now don’t want to be “inconvenienced”. It’s too much for people to think about the health of other people. We have become a society of self….me me me is all we really think about. People may condemn me when I say this, but sometimes I think we have too much freedom and too many freedoms and that our society as a whole has become a winner take all at the expense of everyone/everything else.
I was born before there was a cure for polio. As a kid, I had no awareness or consciousness of polio, it was not even part of the family conversation nor was it discussed with neighbors or friends. I have no idea why it was so little talked about in my little world. Maybe my parents didn’t want to worry me and my brother? I do remember seeing the kids confined to an iron lung on TV and the fund drives for a polio cure. That did get my attention. I do remember taking the oral polio vaccine which was free.
Larry is one year older than I am, and am three years older than Diane. All of us have special memories of the dreaded polio virus.
I recall visiting a friend who was placed in an iron lung, I was about ten years old then and I left feeling very much like she was in a coffin.
My mother, an RN and student nurse during the 1918-19 pandemic, had a real fear of the virus and had formed the opinion that President Frankling Roosevelt had contracted polio while swimming. By extension she was hypervigilent about our desire to go swimming. My mother also had great respect for Sister Kenney who tried to make the case that children with polio did not always benefit from wearing heavy metal braces in order to move around. We grew up knowing that President Roosevelt went to Warm Springs Georgia for some relief from his usual confinement with braces.
My student teaching and also first year of teaching was at the “The Roosevelt School for Handicapped Children” in Miami, Florida. That school had a small swimming pool for physical therapy. Many children wore braces and wrangled crutches to get around. At lunch time, the cafeteria lines were filled with the cacophony of crutches and the acrobatics of everyone trying to manage those inflexible “sticks” while balancing food trays, and avoiding tumbles. I learned about “differentiated instruction” long before that became a thing.
As a teen and young adult, I was also aware of the competition between Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk for an effective vaccine. Salk was the winner, but Sabin’s work contributed to a broader understanding of the virus and his oral vaccine was widely used outside of the United States.
If you are old enough to remember the Polio Summers, your first impulse when confronted by those smugly stupid anti-vaccine crusaders is to smash them in the mouth. Polio, smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, all these child-killing disease are gone–for now! The only thing that can bring them back is deliberate ignorance and hatred of science. And we have plenty of that ,
Every summer my family would make a trip to North Carolina to see my mother’s mother. My mother was one of those people for whom family was sort of holy. There was this one aunt in Winston-Salem who was the mother of three creative boys that were the subject of constant conversation around my mother. That was the family she loved more than any other, perhaps because one of the boys knew all 42 steps of the Charleston.
I was too young, but my brother recalls the year we did not stop to see Aunt Winnie. There was rumored to be polio in Winston-Salem. For her to pass up a visit there was undoubtedly crushing.
Years later, when I was teaching near Winston-Salem, I was able to represent my mother at Aunt Winnie’s funeral. They stopped all traffic on Interstate 40 westbound for her procession as we went to the graveyard. In Aunt Winnie’s lifetime, she had seen the Spanish Flu, the Polio, and a medical mistake that had taken the life of her middle son. I drove onto the interstate that day thinking that it was fitting that the world stop at least for an instant, since my mother could not stop for that day when there was polio.
I remember polio. All of our mothers told us wash your hands or you will get polio and end up in an iron lung. Yikes.
Growing up in Chicago during the 50s. Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pox, Rubella, and every summer till 1954 a Polio scare..