There are surely plenty of us still alive who remember April 19, 1955. The day we got inoculated with the polio vaccine created by Dr. Jonas Salk. I was somewhere in this group of students who received the shot from Dr. Roy Lander of Victoria, Texas.
I've posted about the experience before and was reminded of it today when Instapundit linked to a piece about video footage of the first polio shots in Virginia in 1955. Our town didn't have a television station so there wouldn't have been video coverage in Victoria. But there were a lot of photos, as that front page of the Victoria Advocate of April 20, 1955, attests. I remember the lines in the hall as we waited to go into the principal's office for the inoculations.
I've always been in awe of the changes that my grandmother saw in her lifetime (1901-1996), a real transformation of the modern world. But I am grateful that I missed polio, influenza and other pandemics that brought the modern world to its knees within that span of years.
I've posted about the experience before and was reminded of it today when Instapundit linked to a piece about video footage of the first polio shots in Virginia in 1955. Our town didn't have a television station so there wouldn't have been video coverage in Victoria. But there were a lot of photos, as that front page of the Victoria Advocate of April 20, 1955, attests. I remember the lines in the hall as we waited to go into the principal's office for the inoculations.
I've always been in awe of the changes that my grandmother saw in her lifetime (1901-1996), a real transformation of the modern world. But I am grateful that I missed polio, influenza and other pandemics that brought the modern world to its knees within that span of years.