Polio Wars: Sister Kenny and the Golden Age of American Medicine

During World War II, polio epidemics in the United States were viewed as the country's "other war at home": they could be neither predicted nor contained, and paralyzed patients faced disability in a world unfriendly to the disabled. These realities were exacerbated by the medical community's enforced orthodoxy in treating the disease, treatments that generally consisted of ineffective therapies. Polio Wars is the story of Sister Elizabeth Kenny -- "Sister" being a reference to her status a...