Poliomyelitis, disease of great characters

The name comes from the Greek words polios (gray) and myelos (marrow): poliomyelitis is the inflammation of the gray matter of the spinal cord. Some descriptions in the Bible and other ancient scriptures speak of minors with disabilities, although they could not be completely identified with polio.

Historians of medicine agree, in that the earliest graphic evidence, is an Egyptian stele between 1580 and 1350 BC, in which a man appears with a clearly atrophied leg.

However, it is not until the end of the 18th century that the existence of evil is described with certain accuracy. After numerous outbreaks, in 1789 the British physician Michael Underwood offered the first clinical review referring to polio as a "weakness of the lower extremities".

In the following six decades, little was written about it, until Jacob Heme, a German physician, published in 1840 a monograph that not only detailed its clinical aspects, but suggested its connection to the spinal cord.

Finally, in 1908 the poliovirus was identified by two Austrian doctors, Karl Landsteiner - the same one who discovered the blood groups and who therefore received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1930 - and Erwin Popper.

It is likely that one of the most important accolades for the study of poliomyelitis was the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt suffered it and became, therefore, a symbol of the fight against infection. Roosevelt contracted the disease in 1921 at 39 years of age, which did not prevent him from being president of the United States of America during 4 periods, between 1933 and 1945.

 

Other characters

Already in Mexico, the best-known emblem of polio is Frida Kahlo. The painter contracted this disease at six years, affecting more his right leg than the left, which always covered with long skirts. The subsequent bus accident she suffered as a teenager further damaged her fragile health.

Other characters that have been victims of polio, without this disease has made a dent in his spirit have been: the Emperor Claudius, English science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, author, among other books, 2001: Odyssey of the Space; film director Francis Ford Coppola, who contracted polio at age 9; the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the internationally acclaimed violinist of Israeli origin, Itzhak Perlman.


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