Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors

Great Price "Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors" for $21.54 Today

As a person born after the invention of the polio vaccines, polio was not the scourge of my childhood, in fact, I knew practically nothing about the disease until reading this book.

"Living with Polio" tell relates the stories of people who contacted polio and their struggles with infection and polio treatments, their triumphs in life and love, and their experiences with PPS (Post-Polio Syndrome). No detail of these experiences is spared and a true and clear picture emerges of what it must have been like to live with this disease.

Of particular interest to me, a student of human sexuality education, was the inclusion by the author of the survivors sexuality. Although stricken with polio, these people did not loose their sexuality when paralysis set in and it was very refreshing to see that aspect of the experience included.

"Living with polio" was not only an informative read, it was a well written and engaging one. Highly Recommended!


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Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors Overviews

Polio was the most dreaded childhood disease of twentieth-century America. Every summer during the 1940s and 1950s, parents were terrorized by the thought that polio might cripple their children. They warned their children not to drink from public fountains, to avoid swimming pools, and to stay away from movie theaters and other crowded places. Whenever and wherever polio struck, hospitals filled with victims of the virus. Many experienced only temporary paralysis, but others faced a lifetime of disability.

Living with Polio is the first book to focus primarily on the personal stories of the men and women who had acute polio and lived with its crippling consequences. Writing from personal experience, polio survivor Daniel J. Wilson shapes this impassioned book with the testimonials of more than one hundred polio victims, focusing on the years between 1930 and 1960. He traces the entire life experience of the survivors—from the alarming diagnosis all the way to the recent development of post-polio syndrome, a condition in which the symptoms of the disease may return two or three decades after they originally surfaced.

Living with Polio follows every physical and emotional stage of the disease: the loneliness of long separations from family and friends suffered by hospitalized victims; the rehabilitation facilitieswhere survivors spent a full year or more painfully trying to regain the use of their paralyzed muscles; and then the return home, where they were faced with readjusting to school or work with the aid of braces, crutches, or wheelchairs while their families faced the difficult responsibilities of caring for and supporting a child or spouse with a disability.

Poignant and gripping, Living with Polio is a compelling history of the enduring physical and psychological experience of polio straight from the rarely heard voices of its survivors.

(20041129)

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Customer Review

Living With Polio - Jack J. Levy -
As aa Polio survivor who has read other documents and a book by Dr. Lauro Halstead on the same subject, I found this book very poorly written, and very very repetitive.

An important book - Timothy J. Bazzett - Reed City, MI USA
Wilson's book was one of my most valuable resources when I was researching my own book, LOVE, WAR & POLIO. It is chock full of important historical information on the periodic polio epidemics that swept the country in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as information on how the disease was treated and how patients were housed - often "warehoused" - and how they and their families coped or failed to. My only complaint - more of a disappointment really - was that there was very little personal information from Wilson, about his own struggles with polio, as a child and an adult. But make no mistake. This is an extremely well researched and an important document on a once-terrifying disease.

Related to Items You've Viewed

• Polio: An American Story
• Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio (Anniversary Edition)
• A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors
• The Polio Paradox: Understanding and Treating "Post-Polio Syndrome" and Chronic Fatigue
• The Post-Polio Experience: Psychological Insights and Coping Strategies for Polio Survivors and Their Families

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: May 09, 2010 16:24:09

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