Charles L Mee’s memoir A Nearly Normal Life (Little, Brown & Co, 1999) wonderfully evokes the atmosphere of early 1950’s small-town America and the constant dread that the annual polio epidemics brought to a land so shaped by the ethos of optimism, youth and health and can-do. But the last thing Mee, a 14-year-old, ‘with buck teeth, a crew cut, a love of swimming, football and comic books’ expects is that his life will be for ever changed by this disease. This was something that happened to other people. There was no cure for the disease and it struck unpredictably…

…and left its victims dead or paralyzed, washed up in wheelchairs, white-faced, shrunken, with frightened eyes, light blankets over their legs, or lying on their backs inside iron lungs, constantly shushing and hissing with the intake and exhaust of pressure that made a person’s diaphragm expand and contract, breathing for him because the muscles in his chest had stopped working - his head and feet sticking out uselessly at either end.

In 1953, the 14-year-old Mee himself catches the dread disease. He seems to have picked up the virus on a road trip with his mother and sister from their home in Barrington, Illinois, to Boulder, Colorado.
[Read more →]