The Life and Legend of a Polio Victim

The Life and Legend of a Polio Victim

Author: Dr. Cliff Edward Williams

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2009-03-19

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 1462837980

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Dr. Cliff Williams was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi. At age eighteen months, he was stricken with polio. He had corrective surgery when he was about five years old. Dr Williams attended St. Francis Elementary and High School, Yazoo City, Mississippi. After high school, he had the second surgery on his right foot and later was fitted with a leg brace. The next year he had the third surgery again on the right foot. He kept the faith and attended Mississippi Vocational College, Itta Bena, Mississippi, where he earned the bachelor of science degree in business education. Later, he attended the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, where he earned the masters degree in business education. He also earned the doctorate degree in business education with a cognate area in Organizational Behavior Management at the University of Houston, Houston, Texas. Dr. Williams spent one year in St. Louis, Missouri, and worked as a teletype operator for the Third District Police Department. He returned to Mississippi and taught school at OBannon High School, Greenville, Mississippi, for two years. After the last year at OBannon, he accepted a position to teach business subjects at Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, Mississippi. He was employed there for thirty-five years. During this time, he was married to Ms. Catherine Williams and he is the father of two children. Tragedy struck in his life as his brother-in-law was killed, gangland style, in Chicago, Illinois. Another brother-in-law was killed during a robbery, while he was working in a convenience store in Houston, Texas. Later, his auntie died from emphysema, and his father had a fatal heart attack. All of this occurred within a span of two years. He had gotten numerous articles published in the Clarion Ledger, a Jackson, Mississippi based newspaper and had published a book. Dr. Williams retired in 1999 and since has served on numerous boards. He also served as vice president of the Mississippi Valley State Alumni Association, Humphreys County chapter and is currently serving as the vice president of the Retired Education Personnel Association, Humphreys County Chapter. He has been able to take family vacations to places like Dayton, Ohio, where they visited the Air Force Museum. Noticeably seen there were the airplanes that were used by presidents Roosevelt, Bush Senior, and Bill Clinton. A trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, resulted in a tour of the National Aeronautic Space Administration (NASA). They went to San Diego and visited other cities such as Lake Elsinore, Alpine, Los Angeles, and Escondido. They stayed at the Lawrence Welk Resort in Escondido, California. While there, they went to Mexico. A trip to Phoenix, Arizona, resulted in a trip to Old Town and the Titan Missel Silo. On a tour they saw George McGoverns home and the home of Paul Harvey. One year, they went to Little Rock, Arkansas, and got a chance to visit the Bill Clinton Library. Another noticeable trip was the one to Orlando, Florida. They visited the Believe It Or Not! Museum, Universal Studios, Epcot Center, and Sea World.


Polio

Polio

Author: Thomas Abraham

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-09-01

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1787380874

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In 1988, the World Health Organization launched a twelve-year campaign to wipe out polio. Thirty years and several billion dollars over budget later, the campaign grinds on, vaccinating millions of children and hoping that each new year might see an end to the disease. But success remains elusive, against a surprisingly resilient virus, an unexpectedly weak vaccine and the vagaries of global politics, meeting with indifference from governments and populations alike. How did an innocuous campaign to rid the world of a crippling disease become a hostage of geopolitics? Why do parents refuse to vaccinate their children against polio? And why have poorly paid door-to-door healthworkers been assassinated? Thomas Abraham reports on the ground in search of answers.


POLIO PRIESTHOOD MY WAY: The Making of the Legend

POLIO PRIESTHOOD MY WAY: The Making of the Legend

Author: Abimbola Adewumi Solebo

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2019-09-28

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0244822271

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Life has thrown some hard knocks at Rev. Dr. Abimbola Adewumi Solebo (Nee) Jekayinfa, she was smitten with infantile paralysis 'polio, before she was two years of age, which resulted into a lifelong partial loss of the function of her right leg. According to her mother, it was a terrible time in the milestone of her life. And this was just the first in the series of positive and negative events of her personal journey in the first fifty years of her amazing life. Rejection, discrimination, adversity which came as a result of polio was one thing that she had to face. This harrowing experience with polio redefined her life and made her the 'wonderfully complex' person that she is today. At a very young age, she found solace in the word of God, in Psalm 27: 1-14 she learnt that you are who God says you are, and disability is just a thing of the mind, she also learnt that God is able to pick her up even when others abandon her and that God is able to keep her safe, and set her high upon the rocks of life.


The Cutter Incident

The Cutter Incident

Author: Paul A. Offit

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2007-09-18

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780300126051

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Vaccines have saved more lives than any other single medical advance. Yet today only four companies make vaccines, and there is a growing crisis in vaccine availability. Why has this happened? This remarkable book recounts for the first time a devastating episode in 1955 at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, thathas led many pharmaceutical companies to abandon vaccine manufacture. Drawing on interviews with public health officials, pharmaceutical company executives, attorneys, Cutter employees, and victims of the vaccine, as well as on previously unavailable archives, Dr. Paul Offit offers a full account of the Cutter disaster. He describes the nation's relief when the polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk in 1955, the production of the vaccine at industrial facilities such as the one operated by Cutter, and the tragedy that occurred when 200,000 people were inadvertently injected with live virulent polio virus: 70,000 became ill, 200 were permanently paralyzed, and 10 died. Dr. Offit also explores how, as a consequence of the tragedy, one jury's verdict set in motion events that eventually suppressed the production of vaccines already licensed and deterred the development of new vaccines that hold the promise of preventing other fatal diseases.


The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Author: Rebecca Skloot

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2010-02-02

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0307589382

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”—Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE • ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” (LITHUB), AND “BEST” (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS • WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Entertainment Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Financial Times • New York • Independent (U.K.) • Times (U.K.) • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • Booklist • Globe and Mail Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.


Mr. Notre Dame

Mr. Notre Dame

Author: Jason Kelly

Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing

Published: 2002-08-05

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1461703328

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Edward "Moose" Krause spent nearly sixty years as a student-athlete, coach, athletic director, and de facto ambassador to the Notre Dame's legions of fans around the world. From an All-American career as a football and basketball player to a struggle with alcoholism in the wake of an accident that nearly killed his beloved wife, Mr. Notre Dame captures his remarkable story.


Bellevue

Bellevue

Author: David Oshinsky

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2017-10-24

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0307386716

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From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a riveting history of New York's iconic public hospital that charts the turbulent rise of American medicine. Bellevue Hospital, on New York City's East Side, occupies a colorful and horrifying place in the public imagination: a den of mangled crime victims, vicious psychopaths, assorted derelicts, lunatics, and exotic-disease sufferers. In its two and a half centuries of service, there was hardly an epidemic or social catastrophe—or groundbreaking scientific advance—that did not touch Bellevue. David Oshinsky, whose last book, Polio: An American Story, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, chronicles the history of America's oldest hospital and in so doing also charts the rise of New York to the nation's preeminent city, the path of American medicine from butchery and quackery to a professional and scientific endeavor, and the growth of a civic institution. From its origins in 1738 as an almshouse and pesthouse, Bellevue today is a revered public hospital bringing first-class care to anyone in need. With its diverse, ailing, and unprotesting patient population, the hospital was a natural laboratory for the nation's first clinical research. It treated tens of thousands of Civil War soldiers, launched the first civilian ambulance corps and the first nursing school for women, pioneered medical photography and psychiatric treatment, and spurred New York City to establish the country's first official Board of Health. As medical technology advanced, "voluntary" hospitals began to seek out patients willing to pay for their care. For charity cases, it was left to Bellevue to fill the void. The latter decades of the twentieth century brought rampant crime, drug addiction, and homelessness to the nation's struggling cities—problems that called a public hospital's very survival into question. It took the AIDS crisis to cement Bellevue's enduring place as New York's ultimate safety net, the iconic hospital of last resort. Lively, page-turning, fascinating, Bellevue is essential American history.


Steel Drivin' Man

Steel Drivin' Man

Author: Scott Reynolds Nelson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-09-28

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 019974114X

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The ballad "John Henry" is the most recorded folk song in American history and John Henry--the mighty railroad man who could blast through rock faster than a steam drill--is a towering figure in our culture. In Steel Drivin' Man, Scott Reynolds Nelson recounts the true story of the man behind the iconic American hero, telling the poignant tale of a young Virginia convict who died working on one of the most dangerous enterprises of the time, the first rail route through the Appalachian Mountains. Using census data, penitentiary reports, and railroad company reports, Nelson reveals how John Henry, victimized by Virginia's notorious Black Codes, was shipped to the infamous Richmond Penitentiary to become prisoner number 497, and was forced to labor on the mile-long Lewis Tunnel for the C&O railroad. Equally important, Nelson masterfully captures the life of the ballad of John Henry, tracing the song's evolution from the first printed score by blues legend W. C. Handy, to Carl Sandburg's use of the ballad to become the first "folk singer," to the upbeat version by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Attractively illustrated with numerous images, Steel Drivin' Man offers a marvelous portrait of a beloved folk song--and a true American legend.


The Last Children’s Plague

The Last Children’s Plague

Author: Richard J. Altenbaugh

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1137527854

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Poliomyelitis, better known as polio, thoroughly stumped the medical science community. Polio's impact remained highly visible and sometimes lingered, exacting a priceless physical toll on its young victims and their families as well as transforming their social worlds. This social history of infantile paralysis is plugged into the rich and dynamic developments of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Children became epidemic refugees because of anachronistic public health policies and practices. They entered the emerging, clinical world of the hospital, rupturing physical and emotional connections with their parents and siblings. As they underwent rehabilitation, they created ward cultures. They returned home to occasionally find hostile environments and always discover changed relationships due to their disabilities. The changing concept of the child, from an economic asset to an emotional commitment, medical advances, and improved sanitation policies led to significant improvements in child health and welfare. This study, relying on published autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories, captures the impact of this disease on children's personal lives, encompassing public-health policies, hospitalization, philanthropic and organizational responses, physical therapy, family life, and schooling. It captures the anger, frustration, and terror not only among children but parents, neighbors, and medical professionals alike.