Customer Reviews

Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (Health & Medicine in American Society)

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I wish I'd read this book while I was writing my own polio book (LOVE, WAR & POLIO: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF YOUNG BILL PORTEOUS) a few years back. Because it's chock full of information and data about those earier polio plague times, the first few decades of the twentieth century. Rogers is a careful and painstaking researcher and documents it all with photos, charts, footnotes, endnotes and bibliography, some of which can make pretty dry reading. But she pays close attention to how polio and the widespread fear and misinformation about the disease affected nearly everything and everyone in those years. She also examines the prevailing theories on its spread and the methods of treatment tried during those troubled times. Most of these ideas and methods, it turns out, were wrong-headed and useless.

For anyone interested in learning more about this now nearly forgotten disease and the fear and panic it once caused in our society, DIRT AND DISEASE: POLIO BEFORE FDR will be a valuable resource.