The Polio Hall of Fame (or the Polio Wall of Fame) consists of a linear grouping of sculptured busts of fifteen scientists and two laymen who made important contributions to the knowledge and treatment of poliomyelitis. It is found on the outside wall of what is called Founder's Hall of the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Georgia, US.
Designed by Edmond Romulus Amateis, the sculpted busts were cast in bronze and positioned in an irregular linear pattern on a white marble wall. Amateis was commissioned by the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation to create the Hall of Fame for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the incorporation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. On January 2, 1958 the monument was unveiled in a ceremony attended by the artist and almost all of the still living scientists. Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s widow, represented her late husband at the ceremony. There is a detailed coverage of the celebration including photographs of the sculptor and the persons involved posing in front of their respective busts in Edward A. Beeman’s biography of one of the scientists, Charles Armstrong (see below No. 6) [2]
The first 15 of the 17 bronze busts show 14 men and one woman, who were instrumental in polio research and treatment. The last two on the right are Roosevelt and his close aide Basil O'Connor. The first four are the European polio pioneers Jakob Heine, from Germany, the two Swedes Karl Oskar Medin and Ivar Wickman and the Austrian Nobel-Prize Laureate Karl Landsteiner. Nos. 5 to 17 are Americans. The order of the busts is not strictly chronological. In spite of his achievements in the field of fighting polio, Hilary Koprowski's (inventor of the world's first effective live polio vaccine) bust was not included in the monument.
| No. | Name | Achievement |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jakob Heine (1800-1879) | Discovered and described infantile paralysis in 1840. [3] |
| 2 | Karl Oskar Medin (1847-1927) | Recognized and described polio as an acute infection (1890). |
| 3 | Ivar Wickman (1872-1914) | Discovered the epidemic character of polio (1907) and coined the term Heine–Medin disease; also showed a high prevalence of non-paralytic polio. |
| 4 | Karl Landsteiner (1868-1943) | Discovered poliovirus and demonstrated transmission to monkeys. |
| 5 | Thomas Milton Rivers (1888-1962) | Chairman of the National Foundation committee on vaccination, which planned the successful 1954 vaccine field trials. |
| 6 | Charles Armstrong (1886-1967) | A Public Health Service physician, Armstrong discovered in 1939 that poliovirus can be transmitted to cotton rats, and started self-tests with nasal spray vaccination. [4] |
| 7 | John R. Paul (1893-1972) | Made essential contributions to the knowledge of how polio is spread. [5] |
| 8 | Albert Sabin (1906-1993) | A leader in the search for a live virus vaccine for polio, Sabin helped show how the virus reached the central nervous system; developed the oral vaccine, which was cheaper and easier to distribute. |
| 9 | Thomas Francis, Jr. (1900-1969) | An epidemiologist at the University of Michigan and Salk’s (No. 15) tutor; recognized the effectiveness of the Salk vaccine. [6] |
| 10 | Joseph L. Melnick (1914-2001) | Developed immunity measures for populations exposed to the virus. |
| 11 | Isabel Morgan (1911-1996) | Prepared an experimental vaccine from virus inactivated with formaldehyde which protected monkeys against paralytic polio. |
| 12 | Howard A. Howe (1901-1976) | The first to show that chimpanzees can acquire polio infection by mouth; carried out small-scale experiments in humans with a formalin- treated vaccine. [7] |
| 13 | David Bodian (1910-1992) | Showed that the virus gets into the blood stream before reaching the central nervous system and therefore could be blocked by antibodies in the blood. [8] |
| 14 | John F. Enders (1897-1985) | Led the way in finding how to grow polio viruses in cultures of non-nervous tissue, which made possible the production of a safe and effective vaccine in quantity. |
| 15 | Jonas E. Salk (1914-1995) | Developed the vaccine which bears his name. |
| 16 | Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) | Founded the Warm Springs Foundation in 1927 and the "National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP)" in 1938. |
| 17 | Basil O'Connor (1892-1972) | The architect of the fight against polio, O'Connor was president of the NFIP from its outset in 1938 and of the "Georgia Warm Springs Foundation" after 1945. |
Beginning in 1924, [9] : 257 the 32nd U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had regularly spent some time at Warm Springs and died there in 1945. [9] : 451 He was struck with a severe paralytic illness in August 1921, diagnosed at the time as polio, while vacationing with his family at their summer home at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Canada. [10] [9] : 236 Roosevelt was permanently paralyzed from the waist down, and unable to stand or walk without support. [11] [12]
In 1927 Roosevelt founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation and a center that is now the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, a comprehensive rehabilitation facility operated by the state of Georgia. [13] A center for post-polio treatment, it provides vocational rehabilitation, long-term acute care, and inpatient rehabilitation for amputees and people recovering from spinal cord injuries, brain damage and stroke. [14] [15]
Poliomyelitis, commonly shortened to polio, is an infectious disease caused by the poliovirus. Approximately 75% of cases are asymptomatic; mild symptoms which can occur include sore throat and fever; in a proportion of cases more severe symptoms develop such as headache, neck stiffness, and paresthesia. These symptoms usually pass within one or two weeks. A less common symptom is permanent paralysis, and possible death in extreme cases. Years after recovery, post-polio syndrome may occur, with a slow development of muscle weakness similar to that which the person had during the initial infection.
Warm Springs is a city in Meriwether County, Georgia, United States. The population was 465 at the 2020 census.
Polio vaccines are vaccines used to prevent poliomyelitis (polio). Two types are used: an inactivated poliovirus given by injection (IPV) and a weakened poliovirus given by mouth (OPV). The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends all children be fully vaccinated against polio. The two vaccines have eliminated polio from most of the world, and reduced the number of cases reported each year from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018.
JakobHeine was a German orthopaedist. He is most famous for his 1840 study into poliomyelitis, which was the first medical report on the disease, and the first time the illness was recognised as a clinical entity. Poliomyelitis is often known as Heine-Medin disease, after the work of Heine and Karl Oskar Medin.
Karl Oskar Medin was a Swedish pediatrician. He was born at Axberg, Örebro and died in Stockholm. He is most famous for his study of poliomyelitis, a condition sometimes known as the Heine-Medin disease, named after Medin and another physician, Jakob Heine. Medin was the first to describe the epidemic character of infantile paralysis.
John Franklin Enders was an American biomedical scientist and Nobel Laureate. Enders has been called "The Father of Modern Vaccines."
F.D. Roosevelt State Park is a 9,049 acres (36.62 km2) Georgia state park located near Pine Mountain and Warm Springs. The park is named for former U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who sought a treatment for his paralytic illness in nearby Warm Springs at the Little White House. The park is located along the Pine Mountain Range. The western portion of the park, formerly named Pine Mountain State Park, was named a National Historic Landmark in 1997. F.D. Roosevelt State Park is Georgia's largest state park.
Thomas Milton Rivers was an American bacteriologist and virologist. He has been described as the "father of modern virology."
Warm Springs is a 2005 made-for-television biography drama film directed by Joseph Sargent, written by Margaret Nagle, and starring Kenneth Branagh, Cynthia Nixon, Kathy Bates, Tim Blake Nelson, Jane Alexander, and David Paymer. The screenplay concerns U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1921 illness, diagnosed at the time as polio, his struggle to overcome paralysis, his discovery of the Warm Springs resort, his work to turn it into a center for the rehabilitation of polio victims, and his resumption of his political career. Roosevelt's emotional growth as he interacts with other disabled people at Warm Springs prepares him for the challenges he will face as President during the Great Depression.
Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, documents the polio epidemic in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s and the race to develop a vaccine, which led to 2 different types of polio vaccine: inactivated poliovirus vaccine, developed by a team led by Jonas Salk, and oral poliovirus vaccine, developed by a team led by Albert Sabin. Published in 2005 by the Oxford University Press, it won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2005 Herbert Hoover Book Award.
The 32nd president of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt's paralytic illness began showing symptoms of in 1921 when he was 39 years old. His main symptoms were fevers; symmetric, ascending paralysis; facial paralysis; bowel and bladder dysfunction; numbness and hyperesthesia; and a descending pattern of recovery. He was diagnosed with poliomyelitis and underwent years of therapy, including hydrotherapy at Warm Springs, Georgia. Roosevelt remained paralyzed from the waist down and relied on a wheelchair and leg braces for mobility, which he took efforts to conceal in public. In 1938, he founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, leading to the development of polio vaccines. Although historical accounts continue to refer to Roosevelt's case as polio, the diagnosis has been questioned in the context of current medical science, with a competing diagnosis of Guillain–Barré syndrome proposed by some authors.
The history of polio (poliomyelitis) infections began during prehistory. Although major polio epidemics were unknown before the 20th century, the disease has caused paralysis and death for much of human history. Over millennia, polio survived quietly as an endemic pathogen until the 1900s when major epidemics began to occur in Europe. Soon after, widespread epidemics appeared in the rest of the world. By 1910, frequent epidemics became regular events throughout the developed world primarily in cities during the summer months. At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, polio would paralyze or kill over half a million people worldwide every year.
Basil O'Connor was an American lawyer. In cooperation with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt he started two foundations for the rehabilitation of polio patients and the research on polio prevention and treatment. From 1944 to 1949 he was chairman and president of the American Red Cross and from 1945 to 1950 he was chairman of the League of Red Cross Societies.
Charles Armstrong was an American physician in the U.S. Public Health Service. He coined the name Lymphocytic choriomeningitis in 1934 after isolating the hitherto completely unknown virus. He discovered in 1939 that poliovirus can be transmitted to cotton rats, and started self-tests with nasal spray vaccination.
Isabel Merrick Morgan was an American virologist at Johns Hopkins University, who prepared an experimental vaccine that protected monkeys against polio in a research team with David Bodian and Howard A. Howe. Their research led to the identification of three distinct serotypes of poliovirus, all of which must be incorporated for a vaccine to provide complete immunity from poliomyelitis. Morgan was the first to successfully use a killed-virus for polio inoculation in monkeys. After she married in 1949, she left the field of polio research in part because she was uncomfortable with trials that tested polio vaccines on the nerve tissue of children. She then worked on epidemiological studies on air pollution. Later in life, she was a consultant for studies of cancer therapies at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute.
Otto Ivar Wickman was a Swedish physician, who discovered in 1907 the epidemic and contagious character of poliomyelitis.
Warm Springs Historic District is a historic district in Warm Springs, Georgia, United States. It includes Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Little White House and the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, where Roosevelt indulged in its warm springs. Other buildings in the district tend to range from the 1920s and 1930s. Much of the district looks the same as it did when Roosevelt frequented the area.
Edmond Romulus Amateis was an American sculptor and educator. He is known for garden-figure sculptures, large architectural sculptures for public buildings and portrait busts.
Joseph Louis Melnick was an American epidemiologist who performed breakthrough research on the spread of polio. The New York Times called him "a founder of modern virology".
John Rodman Paul was an American virologist whose research focused on the spread of polio and the development of treatments for the disease.
