interesting tidbit from Mayo clinic:
Although polio can cause paralysis and death, the vast majority of people who are infected with the poliovirus don’t become sick and are never aware they’ve been infected with polio.
Which reminds me of another interesting disease fact - 95% of people cannot get leprosy.
Everything did. When he died, he was just 63, and he looked, to my eyes anyway, like a man well into his 70s.
"Paralyzed means your nerves don’t work so you don’t feel pain.
No, not necessarily. The nerves that control motion are different nerves than the ones that transmit pain, mostly."
Yes, this is true. My spinal cord injury is an example of this. My nerves controlling motor function are “dead” basically but the nerves controlling sensation remained intact and functioning. So I can’t move anything but I can feel everywhere.
(sorry I had to just manually quote the text, I don’t know if it’s my computer or the board acting funny or what but I’m having trouble with basic posting.)
That’s not what paralyzed means.
This is correct.
Mysteriously, my computer problems have resolved themselves and I’m able to compose a more coherent post.
I have read both of those facts.
I know my [born in 1923] mother was scared enough of polio that all 3 of us were dosed when we hit the right age by the base doctor. She saw the results of the polio epidemic firsthand. From what I have read about it, and pictures and newsreel footage I have seen, I really do not blame her.
People who personally knew polio cases generally tend to be big on vaccination. Polio is horrible, but measles, whopping cough, tetanus, smallpox and other diseases can kill too. Modern medicine with vaccines and antibiotics is an amazing miracle to anyone who can remember before they were common.
As I noted above (post #16), Hitler was contemptful of FDR because of it.
Newborn infants can get polio without any serious effects, generally. I think the age limit is something like 6 weeks or so, IIRC. If you get it while younger than that, I’ve read it just looks like a bad cold. AND, you will be immune to polio thereafter!
The polio virus is said to be extremely common (or at least was before everybody was getting vaccinated). I don’t know if it still persists in the environments, without there being people to carry it.
In the early part of the 20th century or so, before people had much notion of general hygiene, babies were allowed to crawl around on the floor or whatever, and it was near universal that they would get polio very quickly, before the age limit, and be over it. It’s a common theory (although I’ve also read that some people think this is bullshit), that once parents became careful to keep their babies in cribs or playpens, off the floor, then babies stopped getting polio. So they stopped getting naturally immunized while it was still relatively harmless. Thereafter, some children, or even adults, got polio at later ages, with the horrible results that everyone knows about. That is when and why polio became a horrific epidemic in the mid-20th century, until the vaccine was developed.
I was a fairly young child (about nursery-school age, IIRC) when the Salk vaccine became available. There were massive public campaigns to get everybody vaccinated. Massive public inoculation clinics were held, often in school or church auditoriums. Families lined up for blocks (just like we did in the mid-1970’s to see the first Star Wars) to get their shots. I remember those.
The shots supposedly didn’t last forever though, and it was said that you would need periodic booster shots to keep the immunity up. Therefore, it was a big thing just a few years later when the Sabin oral vaccine came out. For whatever reason, the Sabin vaccine was supposedly good for life, with no need for boosters. So, when the Sabin vaccine came out, there was another massive public campaign to get everybody to get it, even if we already had our shots. So I remember lining up for that one also. The vaccine was served on a sugar cube.
BTW, I have life-long medium-serious scoliosis, which means a twisted spine. So my back is a little bit bad, and gradually getting worse over the years. I asked a doctor once what might have caused this, and he speculated that I may have had sub-clinical polio as an infant. If so, it’s possible that it might have left the muscles on one side of my body a little bit weaker than the other side, so that the spine would get a little twisted by the stronger support muscles on one side.
Based on the descriptions already in the thread and on what I’ve read from other sources, it appears that it would indeed apply. Not only could he not walk, but he could not support his own body weight standing, so crutches or a walker were as out of the question as a dash down the hallway (I know people who use crutches and who can’t stand by themselves, but in their case one leg is much shorter than the other and they can support their weight on the long leg and another item - FDR’s legs worked about as well as yours). He could move in and out of the wheelchair but he could not move around without it.
Shush – don’t say that!
The anti-vax nuts will jump on that to blame the Sabin polio vaccine for the rise in obesity and diabetes over the years since then.
Not quite true that he could not move about without the wheelchair. He had a horrible fear of fire and he would regularly roll out of bed and crawl to the door of his house to show himself he could escape in case of fire. He had an elevator powered by pulling on ropes at his home so he could go downstairs in case of fire.
In his book Going Solo Roald Dahl writes of being invited to the White House after Eleanor Roosevelt fell in love with his book The Gremlins. He became friends with the couple and would often visit them at Hyde Park. He saw FDR drive his specially made car, which he drove completely with his hands.
Apparently the Roosevelts were not ashamed and did not try to hid FDR’s condition.
Note to self: next time I think about crawling, mention it. Yeah, he could crawl, but crawling is not a normal method of locomotion for people above age 2. Being able to crawl is less wheelchair-bound than someone who’s tetraplegic but it still meets most people’s definition of wheelchair-bound.
I knew. However I was born long after his death.
The language is still outdated.
What was the alternative? Powered by coal oil?
Coulda sworn electric elevators were invented in the 19th century.
Fires frequently cause electric power to go out in the building. So if you live in an old, burnable building, and are unable to get down stairs by yourself, making sure that you can operate the elevator by pulling on ropes in an emergency seems a sensible precaution.
Then it would help us a lot to know what the current language is.
As already mentioned, ‘wheelchair-user’ is the generally preferred term.
I’m not disabled, but I’ve met a few people who got quite annoyed about the description ‘wheelchair bound’. Even someone very profoundly disabled doesn’t literally spend their life in a wheelchair, and people I’ve spoken to said that words like ‘bound’ or ‘confined’ sound very negative, restrictive and slightly patronising, rather than just describing an aid that someone has chosen to use.
