For those here who've never encountered polio or know survivors of it, it's one of the scariest diseases imaginable. My father's generation was one of the last to commonly grow up with it, and medicine was entirely unable to provide much support to sufferers of the virus. I know he grew up in a large family, and I also know that 2 or maybe 3 uncles and aunts of mine were killed in childhood from it.

One of my uncles also had it and survived, but was crippled for the rest of his life. He was able to get around okay with braces and a cane until his mid-50s. And then the trauma from the disease finally caught up to him and he spent the rest of his life as a paraplegic with breathing troubles that finally killed him in his early 70s.

My father may have caught it, but was able to fight it off. He also has Guillain-Barré syndrome and attributes it to that period.

Medicine was so unable to cope with the volume and severity of the patients during the 30s and 40s that "alternative" remedies came into full fashion. In 1949, a researcher named Fred R. Klenner claimed to have found that high doses of vitamin-C could ward off the virus. As a result households stricken with polio often found themselves stuffed to the gills with donations of fruits, vegetables and strangely goats as it was believed that goat milk had high doses of the vitamin.

Salk's discovery of the vaccine, the trials around it and the mass global uptake afterwards have almost rendered the virus extinct. But it could almost never happen today.