San Antonio College Library

Looks at the discovery of the polio vaccine which eventually eradicated the polio disease.

"Polio, with its haunting images of disabled children and the iron lung, was one of the iconic diseases of the 20th century. In the 1950s, only the atomic bomb frightened Americans more than this debilitating scourge which could break into any home and paralyse or kill a healthy child. Now, vaccination has pushed polio to the brink of extinction - but its complete eradication may still elude us. Mankind's struggle to defeat polio was one of the grand...

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...

Describes Franklin D. Roosevelt's fight to overcome the handicap of polio and examines the effects of this struggle on his character. " While F.D.R.'s bout with polio is a well-known fact, we never think of the 32nd President of the United States as a man who could not walk, a man for whom even standing with leg braces was an ordeal. In that unenlightened era, his handicap was concealed from the public eye. Yet this disabled man converted retreat...

"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....

"In the aftermath of the Korean War, Peggy's small hometown is rife with anti-Communist hysteria. But Peggy has bigger problems: She's struggling to recover from polio. Taunted by her classmates, Peggy just wants to be a normal kid, until she stumbles across a mysterious object that gives her the power to fly. Unscrupulous operatives from the American and Soviet governments seek the object to overturn the tense political stalemate, and Peggy finds...