It was the robber of hope for a generation, several generations
of children. There were diseases, and scientists will chart
them, that were more devastating, affecting more children, more
deadly than polio. But polio left kids crippled, and that was an
image that this big strong postwar country simply couldn't
abide. We had children lining up in wheelchairs, in iron lungs,
whose very vitality and everyone's hope for their future was
allayed right at the most critical time in their childhoods. And
that's why polio seemed like such a horrible scourge, far more
so than any number of other diseases or accidents that, any way
you want to measure it, were more deadly and were fatal. And the
image of a child in an iron lung is about as tearful and
wrenching as we could imagine at that time, and any time
certainly in this century. There were many other diseases that
were bad for America, but polio broke Mark Sauer, polio survivor
quoted in A Paralyzing Fear Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 In the
summer of 1916, New York Cit