| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors. By Daniel J. Wilson. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xii, 300 pp. $29.00, ISBN 0-226-90103-3.)
In the mid-1960s, Ed Roberts, a polio survivor dependent on a respirator, applied to the University of California at Berkeley. Despite being academically prepared after two years of work at a community college, a Berkeley dean opposed Roberts's admission, telling him bluntly, "We've tried cripples before and it didn't work." Roberts prevailed, moving into the university infirmary and adopting a motorized wheelchair to get around campus. By the time he graduated, twelve other disabled students had also enrolled.	1
Daniel J. Wilson, who identifies himself as a polio survivor, has written a powerful study of the lived experience of those who experienced the ravages of polio. In this respect, his work extends the important theoretical emphasis in the history of medicine, as Roy Porter would have said, to look at disease from the patient's point of view. Wilson's work goes further, however, by exploring the cultural and social meanings of polio, and, more important, how the patients who survived this illness helped to establish the disabilities civil rights movement that would curtail the power of such people as Berkeley's dean to exclude the disabled from mainstream activities of American life.	. . .

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