Tag: history

Apr 26, 1954: Polio Vaccine Trials Begin

On this day in 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo. On April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere.

Woman dies in iron lung after outage

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – A woman who spent nearly 60 years of her life in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said.

Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long machine since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old.

snip

Odell was afflicted with “bulbo-spinal” polio three years before a polio vaccine was discovered and largely stopped the spread of the crippling childhood disease.

She spent her life in the iron lung, cared for by her parents and other family members. Though confined inside the 750-pound apparatus, Odell managed to get a high school diploma, take college courses and write a children’s book.

The iron lung that she used was a cylindrical chamber with a seal at the neck. She lay on her back in the device with only her head exposed, and made eye contact with visitors using an angled mirror above her head. The lung worked by producing positive and negative pressure on the lungs that caused them to expand and contract so that she could breathe.

In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery.

Insanity is the key to the teabagger’s “success” stupidity, and if you look at recent history,

Some of the nation’s top tea party leaders, are using you.

history is merely repeating itself.

Hello I started an fun Tuesday Open Thread at firefly-dreaming a few weeks back and I thought you might like to see this one.  Just a small way to honor the people who talked last night on the special edition of American Experience called “Earth Days.”

During the closing credits this song was playing;

And each speaker was shown first in their environment, then again in a box with a brief explanation of what they are doing today.  Talk about “people powered politics.”

Below the fold are some pictures I took of my television last night. It was out of respect.  

Though I no longer live there, I suppose I will always be a Son of the South.  Where I grew up, a strong sense of solidarity with the Lost Cause of the Confederacy still existed, which to me was more a romantic ideal of what might had been then any desire for Round Two of the conflict.  I always felt it to be analogous to the sort of people who support a particular sports team that is always a heavy underdog and spend much time waxing poetically between themselves about close losses.  “If only”, these attitudes seemed to say.  “If only.”  So on at least one level I think I can understand the mentality of the Teabaggers, since their resistance to Progressive reforms is often tied to a profound sense of nostalgia for some golden age long past and likely never to return.  The particularly irony, of course, is that this epoch they reference never really existed in the first place.

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s decision to denote the month of April as Confederate History Month and the controversy surrounding it reminds me of the political back and forth that raged when my home state of Alabama was contemplating removing the Confederate flag from the top of the Capitol building in Montgomery.  Then, as now, many of the same arguments were heard.  After years of debate, the flag was at last taken down.  South Carolina is the last of the southern states to keep the flag flying, but even so, several other Deep South states incorporate the design into their own state flags, having faced massive popular backlash when they threatened to remove the pattern altogether.  

The Geek usually does not write about history, but he will make an exception.  First, Easter this year coincides with my father’s birthday.  He was born on this date in 1919.  If he were still alive, he would have just turned 91 years old.  My granddad on his side lived to that age.

Second, Easter is by proclamation the highest of the Holy Days in the Christian tradition.  Christmas is also joyful, but everyone is borne and only One has, as tradition and religion insists, been resurrected.

Third, the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences insisted on a well rounded education before anyone could be graduated.  Whilst I am a scientist, I appreciate literature, art, architecture, and especially history.

On a historical note, today is the date on which Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968.  On a more personal historical note, my father would have been 91 today, but he died in 2005.

Cross-posted at DailyKos.

At 11:30 yesterday morning on the corner of Greene St. and Washington Pl. I met Firefighter James M. Sorokac for the first time. I’d never met him before but being the keeper of “The Last Alarm” and a member of the of the FDNY ceremonial unit, his face was far too familiar to me.

In the shadow of the Asch Building he explained that the bell that is rang for the fallen dates back to a time when there was one bell at every NYC fire house. He told me the story of the four fives. When firehouses would communicate to each other across the city by ringing five times in a series of four the message that “a brother has fallen in the line of duty.”

Today that bell is rang once by a white gloved firefighter at funerals and memorial services.

Yesterday Firefighter James M. Sorokac rang that bell 146 times.  

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Paging Ed Shultz, psycho talk in the wingnut isle.

    Screw going to 11. The Conservative Freak Out continues to go to infinite and beyond.

    Witness Rep. Paul Broun as he flat out rewrites history in a disgusting attempt to compare Health Care Reform into something scary, such as that “Great war of Yankee aggression”. In the reality based world, we call that THE CIVIL WAR!

    Watch . . .

BROUN: If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the War Between The States – the Great War of Yankee Aggression.

thinkprogress.org

    So Ronald Reagan will replace that Yankee agressor President Grant on the $50 bill because Reagan’s accomplishments (cough – Jack Shit- cough) are greater than FREEING THE SLAVES?

    Holy revisionist history, batman! WTF?

More below the fold . . . .

It seems like everywhere you look these days, someone’s trying to spread…The Fear.

All around us…in every town…on every corner…a massive Army Of Fear is standing by, according to the Messengers, ready at a moment’s notice to obey the dictates of some unappointed Czar or another.

Just ask Glenn Beck: concentration camps for the white people, jackbooted stormtroopers ready to snatch the guns from your cold dead fingers…Socialist Government-Controlled Healthcare That Threatens Your Not Socialist Medicare…it’s all coming, my friends-and unless we organize, as a community, to return to the values of the Founding Fathers, The Government, meaning that awful Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and George Soros and all the other Evil Community Organizers, will win.

There’s no government, we’re told, like no government.

You know who would find all of this fear of self-government just entirely bizarre?

The Founding Fathers.

In today’s conversation we’ll consider the fundamentals of American patriotism, we’ll ask one of those Founding Fathers how he saw the role of Government-and we’ll toss in a few words from Abraham Lincoln, just for good measure.

The sterilizations of indigenous women were covert means of the continuation of the extermination policy against the Indian Nations. At least three indigenous generations from 3,406 women are not in existence now as the result. The sterilizations were not unintentional or negligible. They were genocide. What would the indigenous culture and political landscape be now? One can only imagine, but the sterilizations like the relocations – were forced.