It is difficult to find a single disease that has inspired a sheer mass of historiography comparable to that addressing polio in the United States. There are myriad reasons for this abundance: the giant shadow cast by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the tendency of many polio epidemics to concentrate among young children and adolescents, the stark visibility of polio, the post-World War Two rise of the American biomedical research enterprise and its connection to the development of a vaccine, and of course the success in virtually eliminating the disease from the American population. Heather Green Wooten situates her work in this broader literature, and this book fills a niche as the first study devoted to assessing the history of polio in Texas during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Drawing primarily on oral and archival techniques, Wooten produces a lively and well-researched account of how Texans understood and responded to polio during those decades.
However, Wooten's monograph is not disability history.
Comments and suggestions welcome, of course.
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