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Polio and Its Aftermath
Marc Shell
The Paralysis of Culture
Harvard University Press
June 2005
336 pages ISBN: 0674013158 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
It was not long ago that scientists proclaimed victory
over polio, the dread disease of the 1950s. More recently
polio resurfaced, not conquered at all, spreading across
the countries of Africa. As we once again face the specter
of this disease, along with other killers like AIDS and
SARS, this powerful book reminds us of the personal cost,
the cultural implications, and the historical significance
of one of modern humanity's deadliest biological enemies.
In Polio and Its Aftermath Marc Shell, himself a victim of
polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Part
memoir, part cultural criticism and history, part
meditation on the meaning of disease, Shell's work combines
the understanding of a medical researcher with the
sensitivity of a literary critic. He deftly draws a
detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a
crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of
human existence. Polio and Its Aftermath conveys the widespread panic that
struck as the disease swept the world in the mid-fifties.
It captures an atmosphere in which polio vied with the Cold
War as the greatest cause of unrest in North America--and
in which a strange and often debilitating uncertainty was
one of the disease's salient but least treatable symptoms.
Polio particularly afflicted the young, and Shell explores
what this meant to families and communities. And he reveals
why, in spite of the worldwide relief that greeted Jonas
Salk's vaccine as a miracle of modern science, we have much
more to fear from polio now than we know.
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