For the year, Shawnee County saw 130 residents diagnosed with poliomyelitis -- an acute infectious disease caused by a viral inflammation of the gray matter of the spinal cord -- and five deaths. Of those, 112 were in Topeka, which reported the second-highest number of victims in the state for that year, according to the state board of health. Wichita had 241 cases.

More than 70 percent of those diagnosed that year were younger than 14.

And the treatment could be tough for children.

Polio patients slept on thin mattresses and without a pillow in an effort to keep their backs straight, said Dr. Sharon McKinney, who suffered from polio when she was a 6-year-old in California.

"They put me in the pediatric ward," McKinney said. "I remember being insulted. I was 6, and they put me in a crib."

Patients also laid with their feet pressed flat against a footboard.

"That was to keep you from getting drop-foot," McKinney said. Drop-foot is a condition where the infected foot droops to one side and doesn't lie flat.

During the initial attack of polio, some of the motor neurons in the spinal cord are damaged or destroyed, McKinney said. Surviving neurons create new nerve connections, enabling the patient to recover some strength and use of the infected muscles.

"The recovery of the muscle, at the time, was sufficient for it to appear normal," said McKinney, who suffers from post-polio syndrome and is retired. "It was not actually normal. It's having to work harder to substitute for all the muscles that aren't working."

Eventually, the overburdened nerve cells begin to fail, resulting in new muscle weakness in the infected and thought-to-be uninfected muscles.

"It's like a car with eight cylinders, and only four of them are working," said Jeanette Bartels Bigham, who had polio as a 7-year-old.

In the early to mid-1950s, a vaccine was developed to inoculate people against polio, McKinney said. No cases have been reported in the Western Hemisphere for several years.

The March of Dimes estimates that as many as 250,000 U.S. polio survivors may have post-polio syndrome.

Kasha Stoll can be reached at CAS_KLS@yahoo.com.

By the numbers

The number of Kansans diagnosed with polio spike in August and September 1952:

Date Diagnoses

Aug. 16 79

Aug. 23 101

Aug. 30 110

Sept. 6 162

Sept. 13 181

Sept. 20 180

Sept. 27 123

Source: The Topeka Capital-Journal archives