Polio
Polio was the disease that tore through the world unlike any other disease had before. It is a disease that changed everyone's life by instilling fear and discrimination into them. Polio was physically painful for its victims but it was even more emotionally agonizing for them, their family, and their friends. Polio had a negative impact its victims because of the medical and social aspects that were associated with the disease. The fact that Polio was feared so much made it hard to finally accept that the victims of Polio were not to blame, but when people realized that there was a way to prevent Polio, it created tolerance. Because of medical advancements and public awareness, those disabled with polio were gradually accepted into the American society. Although Polio in the 20th century was new to America, it was not the first time Polio had struck. The story of the Polio epidemic in America is recent but the actual disease dates back to the Egyptians. Thirty-five hundred years ago, an Egyptian craftsman carved a picture of a man who was crippled. Historians believe that this picture was depicting a man who had contracted Polio. During the Greek times, a Greek physician Hippocrates and his Roman disciple Galen wrote about
Well, the first time I used the wheelchair they sent me home with, the nurse was pushing me down the street and this old man saw me and started walking backwards, saying, 'Oh, you poor thing, you poor thing, what happened to you?' And I got really angry, really upset.21 Even though being away from their families, their home, and their regular everyday life was difficult, it was sometimes easier for the children who had polio to stay in the hospital than to have to go back to school and to face the ostracism of their schoolmates. Lawerence Becker was a sufferer of Polio who contracted the disease when he was thirteen in the Nebraska epidemic of 1952. After spending time in hospitals and rehab centers for two and a half years, he had to return to his home and school.16 Becker explains what he went through and talks about how being with adolescents his age was the most difficult part of coming home. When he was in different situations, mostly out of school, he found it difficult to interact with the other children. Becker remembers crying about it to his parents and how they kept him away from those situations so that he would not have to experience the pain of being ostracized. This did have a negative effect however and he says, "which meant, of course, that I had no social life - and no adolecence.17 The fact was that many times the children or adolescence with polio did not want to put themselves into social situations because they believed that they had something wrong with them that was worthy of being discriminated for. Joan Headly was another polio victim who had polio when she was fifteen months old. Although she does not remember anything about having the disease, she does remember feeling discriminated against in situations later on in her life. When she was in kindergarten, there was a Halloween event when all the children put on costumes and walked through the other classrooms and no one was supposed to recognize them with their costumes on. She explains how she felt disabled in this situation even though she had had polio a long time ago.18 She says:
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3080
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page double spaced)
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