OPAF Orthotics and Prosthetics (O&P) Awareness Initiative

Newspaper Articles

Five articles on Polio, Post Polio, and Warm Springs, Georgia

by M.A.J. McKenna staff writer, science and medicine
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

• Article 1 • Article 2 • Article 3 • Article 4 • Article 5 •

Additional readings and information about polio and post polio

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Patients with severe paralysis after polio infection faced many obstacles in daily life. The Institute matched its teaching to the patients' abilities, interests, and goals. Photo © RWSIR

Most left without looking back, but a few recorded the experience. One was Bertram Paul Schmitt, known as Paul, who contracted polio at age 17, just days before he was to enter college in 1939. He arrived at Warm Springs on a gurney in January 1940, paralyzed from the shoulders down, and left at Thanksgiving, walking on crutches and with a brace on one lower leg.

During his stay, he wrote home every week; when his mother, father or younger brother visited, each wrote to those who had stayed behind. Reading the letters, preserved in crumbling scrapbooks in the Roosevelt Institute's archives, provides a glimpse into the patience and determination that polio treatment demanded.

Paul arrived at Warm Springs by train Jan. 8 with his mother, Edna Diehl Haines Schmitt. They had been traveling for almost 24 hours; Paul was encased in a cast from hips to toes, topped by a tightly laced corset to support the weakened muscles of his trunk.

"Nearly everyone you see is apparently hopelessly crippled," Edna wrote to her husband, Bertram, and younger son, Bob, that first day. "Just after dinner, a few minutes ago, they all got out of their wheelchairs and with an attendant before them and behind them, they (tried) to walk a few steps with crutches. I nearly wept in front of them."

"Dear Fish-face," Paul wrote to his brother several days afterward. "I thought I was heavy, but since I have been lifted on and off stretchers by an orderly and a nurse, I have changed my mind." In a note to his father, at the end of the month, he confided: "I guess I'll be in bed for about a month yet. It seems they don't, as a rule, let patients sit up for six months."

"I'm beginning to want to sit up in a wheelchair," Paul wrote on Feb. 16. "The (exercise in the pool) isn't hurting as much anymore. I guess my muscles have just decided to quit." Three weeks later, he announced: "They are going to let me sit up. I don't have to wear my night splints any more. As soon as they refit the corset and make (arm) splints for the chair, up I go."

On March 17, Bertram Schmitt visited his son. "Paul looks very well and is very cheerful, but I'll tell you frankly I came back and cried for the pity of it," he wrote to his wife. "He is allowed to sit up an hour a day."

A month later, Paul was still unable to move on his own. "I had a muscle test today instead of next week," he wrote hopefully on April 26. "I should start to get motion now because the muscles are almost strong enough for it." By the end of July, he could report: "I can put myself in my chair now, and get out again, too. . . . I'm also starting to dress myself."

In mid-August came big news: "I'm going to get a walking brace, (but) I don't think the brace will be finished for a few weeks, so I won't be walking before September." He added, a few days later: "I've been trying to swim. . . . You never realize how much you use your legs until you can't use them at all."

By the end of September, Paul began walking short stints with full-length crutches, graduating in late October to the shorter forearm version. "They are pretty hard," he reported. "I'm still working on steps, but I'm not having an awful lot of luck as yet. . . . I want to be able to do them well before coming home."

Paul Schmitt left Warm Springs on Nov. 27, 1940. Four years later, he was awarded a bachelor's degree in marine engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He married twice, had no children and died in 1982.

• Article 1 • Article 2 • Article 3 • Article 4 • Article 5 •

Additional readings and information about polio and post polio

Back to main OPAF O&P Awareness page