"In Bracing Accounts: The Literature and Culture of Polio in Postwar America, Jacqueline Foertsch analyzes the archive of polio-related fiction, nonfiction, film, and ephemera (from the mimeograph machine to the Internet) that has emerged in response to the American polio experience of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Incorporating the remarkable stories of polio's epidemic history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's involvement with polio, the March of Dimes, and the Salk vaccine, Bracing Accounts reads a wide range of literary and cultural polio texts, whose many therapeutic qualities speak to the enduring significance of polio as both a historical event and an index of contemporary perceptions of the American past as well as the progress of disability rights today."--BOOK JACKET.