This is a 1955 photograph of Dr. Jonas Salk with his signature below. The photograph is part of the Abraham Schwadron portrait collection in the National Library. In the photograph Dr. Salk is wearing a lab coat and looking at a series of test tubes.
Jonas Salk (1914–1995) was an American-Jewish doctor and medical researcher, known for his development of the first safe and effective polio vaccine using an inactive virus. Until this discovery, hundreds of thousands of people suffered from the disease caused by the polio virus, which resulted in muscle weakness causing severe disability, paralysis, and even the inability to breathe. The disease has existed for thousands of years, and major outbreaks in America in the twentieth century encouraged scientists to look for ways of preventing the disease. Salk’s vaccine, and a later oral polio vaccine developed by another American-Jewish scientist Albert Sabin, have succeeded in eliminating this terrible disease from most of the world.
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The Polio Scare of the 1950s in America – The fear of contracting polio was a defining characteristic of the 1950s in America, when no cure or preventative treatment was available. Polio is a condition where there is inflammation of the spinal cord which can result in death in some cases and paralysis in many more. Previously healthy children contracted polio and quickly lost control of their limbs, often experiencing temporary or permanent paralysis and relying on an iron lung to breathe or braces to walk. Although other diseases had higher rates of fatality, polio was the most feared because of the long-term disabilities of many survivors. Since the cause of the disease was unknown, many attempts were made to stop the spread of the polio such as quarantines, avoiding public places including swimming pools, and making sure that children were properly bathed, fed, and rested. Jonas Salk, with funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now known as the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, was the first to develop a vaccine for polio in 1953. An oral, live-virus vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin in 1961. With the development of the vaccines and the rapid implementation of programs to vaccinate children, the disease was eradicated in the United States by 1979.
