ABSTRACT
At the time that I contracted poliomyelitis, it was the most feared, and also the most dramatized, infectious disease in the United States. Since 1916, polio epidemics had been occurring in the U.S. every summer, with the gravest of these taking place during the 1940s and 1950s. Because polio was considered to be preponderantly a disease that struck very young children, it was originally referred to as infantile paralysis. A wave of anxiety, sometimes bordering on panic, swept over cities like New York as each summertime season of polio approached. Parents were warned that their children should not drink from water fountains, swim in public pools, frequent crowded places like beaches, amusement parks, and movie theatres, or become excessively hot, chilled, or fatigued. It was known that a very infectious intestinal virus caused polio, but how the disease spread thorough human-to-human contact, who would get the disease and who would be spared, were less clearly understood. By the mid-1940s, it become more apparent that the incidence of polio was not confined to infants and small children but that it affected many persons fifteen years of age and older, including young adults, and also pregnant women, who were highly susceptible to it. There was no cure for the disease; and it was not until the mid-1950s that the first effective vaccine to prevent it was developed, field tested, licensed, and administered in a mass immunization campaign.
