Abstract
Epidemics exacted an especially heavy toll on children, but cultural artifacts like the following nursery rhyme reenact them in playful, and certainly harmless, ways:
Ring-a-ring o’ roses.
A pocket full of posies,
Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush!
We all fall down.2
Edmund J. Sass, George Gottfired, and Anthony Sorem, Polio’s Legacy: An Oral History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996). As I contemplated the title for this final chapter, I found myself repeatedly attracted by the title of this book. It seemed most appropriate, much better than anything I could imagine.
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Notes and Sources
Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1997): 238.
Also refer to George Childs Kohn (ed.), Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Checkmark Books, 2001): 196–202.
Iona Opie and Peter Opie (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951): 364–365.
The phrase “illusion of medical certainty” represents the basic argument in Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner’s “The Illusion of Medical Certainty: Silicosis and the Politics of Industrial Disability, 1930–1960” (in Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden [eds.], Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992]): 185 and 202.
These polio morbidity and mortality rates can be found in Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996): 10, 11, and 13.
Sauer in Nina Gilden Seavey, Jane S. Smith, and Paul Wagner, A Paralyzing Fear: The Triumph Over Polio in America (New York: TV Books, 1998): 19 and 251, respectively. Also see pp. 245–46.
Edith Powell and John F. Hume, A Black Oasis: Tuskegee Institute’s Fight Against Infantile Paralysis, 1941–1975 (copyright 2008): 130.
Hugh Gregory Gallagher, Black Bird Fly Away: Disabled in an Able-Bodied World (Arlington, VA: Vandamere Press, 1998): 9.
Sharon Barnartt and Richard Scotch, Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970–1999 (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2001): 14.
Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1994): 41, 48–49, 52, and 57–58, respectively; see also pp. 47, 50–51, and 53–56.
Also see Ruth O’Brien, Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001): 10.
Gallagher, Black Bird Fly Away: 107; refer also to pp. 105–06, 110, 112–17, and 120–22. See also Marc Shell, Polio and Its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005): 199–200.
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© 2015 Richard J. Altenbaugh
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Altenbaugh, R.J. (2015). Polio’s Legacy. In: The Last Children’s Plague. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137527851_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137527851_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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