In "The Polio Years in Texas," Heather Green Wooten draws on extensive archival research as well as interviews conducted over a five-year period with Texas polio survivors and their families. This is a detailed and intensely human account of not only the epidemics that swept Texas during the polio years, but also of the continuing aftermath of the disease for those who are still living with its effects.

The silent scourge that held a generation in fear . . . From the 1930s to the 1950s, paralytic poliomyelitis ("polio") threatened the lives of children and adults in Texas, arousing the same kind of fear more recently associated with AIDS and other dread diseases. Harris County had the second-highest rate of infection in the nation, and the rest of the Texas Gulf Coast was particularly hard-hit by this debilitating illness. At the time, though little was known at first, the medical responses to polio changed the medical landscape forever, giving rise to the development of rehabilitative...

Tucked away in a corner of the University of Texas Medical Branch campus stands a majestic relic of an era long past. Constructed of red pressed brick, sandstone, and ruddy Texas granite, the Ashbel Smith Building, fondly known as Old Red, represents a fascinating page in Galveston and Texas history. It has been more than a century since Old Red welcomed the first group of visionary faculty and students inside its halls. For decades, the medical school building existed at the heart of UTMB campus life, even through periods of dramatic growth and change. In time, however, the building lost...