Polio Hall of Fame

  The Polio Hall of Fame (or the Polio Wall of Fame) consists of a linear grouping of sculptured busts of fifteen scientists and two laymen who made important contributions to the knowledge and treatment of poliomyelitis. It is found on the outside wall of what is called Founder's Hall of the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Georgia, USA.

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History of the Monument

Designed by Edmond Romulus Amateis (1926–1977), the scultped busts were cast in bronze and positioned in an irregular linear pattern on a white marble wall. Amateis was commissioned by the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation to create the Hall of Fame for the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the incorporation of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. On January 2, 1958 the monument was unveiled in a ceremony attended by the artist and almost all of the still living scientists. Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s widow, represented her late husband at the ceremony. There is a detailed coverage of the celebration including photographs of the sculptor and the persons involved posing in front of their respective busts in Edward A. Beeman’s biography of one the scientists, Charles Armstrong (see below No. 6) ^[1]

Individuals respresented

The first fifteen of the seventeen bronze busts show fourteen men and one woman, who were instrumental in polio research and treatment. The last two on the right are Roosevelt and his close aide Basil O'Connor. The first four are the European polio pioneers Jakob Heine, from Germany, the two Swedes Karl Oskar Medin and Ivar Wickman and the Austrian Nobel-Prize Laureate Karl Landsteiner. Nos. 5 to 17 are exclusively Americans. The order of the busts is not strictly chronological.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Warm Springs

Beginning in 1924, the 32nd U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had regularly spent some time at Warm Springs and died there in 1945. In 1921 he had developed flaccid paralysis of the upper and lower extremities, which was diagnosed as poliomyelitis. In the light of newer research, however, the disease was probably Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), which was scarcely known at the time. In 1927 Roosevelt founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, which today is known as the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation and takes care of patients with handicaps of all kinds.

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