In the past years, polio is the health condition that will make a person live with it forever. Unfortunately, even some famous people in different parts of the world were caught by this disease. However, the good news is that it never became an obstacle in making their lives worth living and worth remembering. Get to know some of these people.
1. Mia Farrow
Mia has been an actress and a mother to 13 children, and one of them had polio. In her memoir called ‘What Falls Away’, she talked about her experience and life before acquiring polio at 9 years old and even her experiences after having it. She also spent her time in the iron lung. Today, she is already the Ambassador of UNICEF Goodwill. She has been the passionate advocate for child health and polio eradication.
2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
He was the 32nd US President. Pres. Roosevelt experienced a life time change. When he was 39 years old, he acquired poliomyelitis (polio), which is the acute neural virus wherein it made him paralyzed.
3. Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott has been believed to acquire the first case of poliomyelitis in 1773 in British Isles. In one of his writings, he stated that he had showed all the signs of strength and health until he was eighteen months old. One day, they just discovered that there’s something wrong with his right leg. Even if his affected limb was contracted and shrunk, still he became high spirited, healthy, and sturdy kid.
4. Dorothea Lange
Lange was a photographer. Another polio survivor named Dr. Henry Holland wrote about her. He said that at 7 years old, she became ill due to acute poliomyelitis. This residual polio damage included withering of noticeable limp and right lower leg. She viewed this disability as her determination factor in life. She also said that her disability had shaped her personality and it is one thing that she can never escape. A few years later, her limp served as the instrument in helping people disarm on their first encounter with her own camera. Lange felt that the limp might become helpful to strangers to accept her while she was still in the field of photography.
5. Frida Kahlo
Kahlo has been a Mexican painter who contracted poliomyelitis at the age of 6 or 7. She had been confined to her house for about 9 months of recovering processed. One foot and leg were permanently affected making her walked with limp. Frida started painting while she has been recovering from such serious accident between a trolley car and her school bus in 1925. Later, she married Diego Rivera, the famous mural painter of the world.
6. Arthur C. Clark
Clarke has been a very popular writer of science fictions and he was widely famous for writing 2001: Space Odyssey including the 3 sequels. While staying in Sri Lanka, he had contracted poliomyelitis in 1956. He was previously performing underwater exploration but suddenly, he was completely lame due to the post polio syndrome.
