poliomyelitis

A young girl tells about the summer of 1912 in the city of Toronto when her sister got sick, her mother worried about losing her job, and the dippers, a furry dog-like creature with wings, came up out of the nearby Don River.

Just after her eleventh birthday in 1950 and at the height of the frightening childhood polio epidemic, Susan Richards Shreve was sent to the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia. It was a place famously founded by FDR, "a perfect setting in time and place and strangeness for a hospital of crippled children." There the young Shreve meets Joey Buckley, paralyzed from the waist down and determined to leave Warm Springs able to play football. The dual shocks of first love and separation from her fiercely protective mother propel Shreve careening between bad girl rebellion to overachieving saint. This portrait of the psychic fallout of childhood illness ends with a shocking collision between adolescent drive and genteel institution. During Shreve's stay at Warm Springs, the Salk vaccine was discovered; Shreve is one of the last generation of Americans to have survived childhood polio.--From publisher description.

The author relates her search to uncover details of her mother's illness and eventual death in 1956, a victim of the polio epidemic that swept the country in the 1940s and 1950s, interspersing her personal story with reporting on the social and historical impact of the disease.

Discusses the history of polio, the development of the polio vaccine, and its present-day occurrences elsewhere around the world.

Twelve-year-old Nick loves baseball so after a year in the hospital fighting polio and with a brace on one leg, Nick takes a job with the team for which his father is catcher and gets to see the great pitcher, Satchel Paige, play during the 1935 season. Includes historical notes.

In 1952, when Georgie is eleven years old, her family moves to a new Indiana neighborhood where her teenaged neighbor has polio and is in an iron lung.

During the summer of 1932 when Lily is twelve years old, she is granted her two greatest wishes, to be far from the sister who torments her and to have a horse of her own, but she does not expect either the tragic events that bring this about or their consequences.

In 1941, circumstances bring together Brick, a boy from New York's apple country, and Mariel, a young girl made shy by her bout with polio, and the two make a journey from Brooklyn back to help Brick's elderly neighbors save their apple crop and to help Mariel learn about her past.

A biography of Dr. Jonas Salk, looking at his life before, during, and after his discovery of the vaccine that eliminated polio--a crippling and often deadly disease--from America's list of public health concerns.