Race and the Politics of Polio

Warm Springs, Tuskegee, and the March of Dimes

Dados Bibliográficos

ID11037565
AutoresN Rogers (0000-0002-8072-9525, Yale University, autor correspondente)
Ano2007
Volume97
Fascículo5
Páginas784-795
Data de publicação2007-05-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAmerican Journal of Public Health (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0090-0036 • E-ISSN: 1541-0048
EditoraAmerican Public Health Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2105/ajph.2006.095406
PMID17395849
PMCIDPMC1854857
OpenAlexW2031981402
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas10
Referências citadas8

The Tuskegee Institute opened a polio center in 1941, funded by the March of Dimes. The center’s founding was the result of a new visibility of Black polio survivors and the growing political embarrassment around the policy of the Georgia Warm Springs polio rehabilitation center, which Franklin Roosevelt had founded in the 1920s before he became president and which had maintained a Whites-only policy of admission. This policy, reflecting the ubiquitous norm of race-segregated health facilities of the era, was also sustained by a persuasive scientific argument about polio itself: that Blacks were not susceptible to the disease. After a decade of civil rights activism, this notion of polio as a White disease was challenged, and Black health professionals, emboldened by a new integrationist epidemiology, demanded that in polio, as in American medicine at large, health care should be provided regardless of race, color, or creed

Environmental health · Poliomyelitis · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Medicine · Medicine and Dermatology Studies History · Virology