San Antonio College Library

This is the gripping story of the 1950s polio epidemic that terrified America and how it was conquered in a bitter competition between two brilliant scientists. All who lived in the early 1950s remember the fear of polio and the elation felt when a successful vaccine was found. Now David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines--and...

During World War II, polio epidemics in the United States could be neither predicted nor contained, and paralyzed patients faced disability in a world unfriendly to the disabled. Sister Elizabeth Kenny arrived in the US from Australia in 1940 espousing an unorthodox approach to the treatment of polio. The Kenny method, initially dismissed by the US medical establishment, gained overwhelming support over the ensuing decade. Rogers presents both the...

"When a waiting world learned on April 12, 1955, that Jonas Salk had successfully created a vaccine to prevent poliomyelitis, he became a hero overnight. Born in a New York tenement, humble in manner, Salk had all the makings of a twentieth-century icon-a knight in a white coat. In the wake of his achievement, he received a staggering number of awards and honors; for years his name ranked with Gandhi and Churchill on lists of the most revered people....