A Paralyzing Fear

One of my good fortunes in life has been to have parents that were wonderful story tellers. My mother had a veritable treasury of stories from her childhood, growing up in Depression era Tulsa, Oklahoma which I always found fascinating. While it was never a story in itself, over the years I picked up on the fact that, for all the fun that came with summer, there was always a fear as well. The fear of polio.

I heard these stories as I grew up in the seventies and to me at that time, they were stories from ancient history. The mysteries of polio were unlocked by Salk and Sabin in the early fifties. In only twenty years, polio had become ancient history despite having marked several generations.

In The Haunting of Summers Past, Meredith Hindley reviews a documentary, A Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio in America, that tells the story of the impact of polio on the nation, the race to treat the disease and the ultimate success in banishing polio from day-to-day thought.