I remember reacting to my illness without any bitterness, just as a life-changing event. I walked with leg braces, but I was lucky because polio did not affect my lungs or my arms.

Bermúdez was diagnosed with polio at age 6, and has had his left leg in a locked-knee brace for the past 55 years. He was born in Colombia, and came to the United States for graduate school.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the polio vaccine, this multimedia exhibition tells the story of polio from the perspective of the patient, traces the development of the ...

Polio hit its U.S. peak in the 1940s and 1950s, each year infecting thousands of people, most of them children. It caused paralysis and put a generation of children in metal leg braces, some in ...

I started to change my life,” he said. In 2013, Maggi traveled from his home in Argentina to the Hanger Clinic, where he was fit with leg braces that allowed him to finally walk.

Carol Daniel Hammans’ lifelong struggle against polio began about a month after her third birthday in 1943. She woke up that one morning and she was paralyzed except for one arm. “I was scared ...