In 1948, just three years after the end of the Second World War, an earlier pandemic than Covid gripped America. Tens of thousands of people were struck down by the polio virus, and with no cure in sight and a vaccine still to be developed, thousands died. Those who survived were often left crippled—just as America’s then president Franklin D. Roosevelt had been
Seven years earlier, a young doctor named Frederick Klenner, a general practitioner in Reidsville, North Carolina, had begun experimenting with a cure for polio. Inspired by the
