Students at Sunshine Elementary School sang Christmas carols to their homebound classmate, Gwinn Hinkle, as he recovered from polio in 1952.
During the first half of the 20th century, a series of polio epidemics killed thousands annually and left tens of thousands with lifelong complications. After the licensing of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine in 1955, the disease was effectively eradicated, with global infection rates decreasing from hundreds of thousands of cases annually to just a few dozen in the present day…