"Heads, You Win": Newsletters and Magazines of the Polio Nation

Abstract

This article examines a range of polio rehabilitation center newsletters and polio-related quarterly publications from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. Drawing on the writings of disability and textual scholars, it determines that these print materials enabled the formation of polio-affected communities, or even a politically motivated polio nation, whose shared interests, concerns, and newly formed identities were represented in these works. The more grassroots and somacentric the orientation of these periodicals, the more therapeutic they may have been.