CAMILLE BOHANNON

On August 10, 1921, after a day of strenuous activity, 39-year-old 
Franklin D.Roosevelt came down with an illness characterized by
fevers, ascending paralysis, facial paralysis, prolonged bowel
and bladder dysfunction, and numbness and hypersensitivity
of the skin. Roosevelt came close to death from the illness.

Lieutenant Governor George Lunn, FDR, John W. Davis, and
Al Smith at Roosevelt’s family home in Hyde Park, New York. FDR is supporting himself on crutches. August 7, 1924.

FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt at their home in Hyde Park,
New York during the annual pilgrimage of the Dutchess
County Historical Society. September 16, 1927.

On February 23, 1954, a group of children from Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receive the first injections of
the new polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.

Jonas Edward Salk
(October 28, 1914 – June 23, 1995)

President Franklin Roosevelt (left) and Basil O’Connor
count dimes at the White House desk in 1944, after the
President founded March of Dimes to fight polio.
(March of Dimes)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an adult victim of polio, founded the
National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which he later
renamed the March of Dimes Foundation, on January 3, 1938.

On April 26, 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8
million children, began at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School
in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and
Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the
now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient
nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo.

One year later, on April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine
was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America.