1. The polio story as you learned it is wrong. It's one of the most often misunderstood sequence of events in the last two hundred years. I wanted to explain a few things about the disease to help people understand what actually happened.
2. The first modern account of something resembling polio was in 1789. A physician named Michael Underwood described an illness in children he called "Debility of the Lower Extremities." He attributed it to teething and foul bowels.
3. One of the next mentions was from Louisiana in 1841. A few children came down with paralysis. The supposed cause: teething. Why would teething be associated with paralysis?
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4. Various stories appeared throughout the 1800s of children coming down with paralysis, almost always in their legs. Many people called it "teething paralysis," but others settled on "infantile paralysis."
5. This was a new phenomenon: Doctors had never seen it before and didn't know why it was happening. Research began to reveal that the cause of paralysis were lesions on the grey part of the spinal cord.