The Polio Vaccine Begins Here

Before Jonas Salk's polio vaccine could save the world, it had to be tested. The first human trials happened here, at the D. T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, a residential school founded in nineteen seventeen for disabled children on the grounds of a former estate called Sunny Hill.

In nineteen fifty-two, Dr. Salk, working with the home's medical director Dr. Jessie Wright, began injecting the experimental vaccine into patients, staff, and children from the surrounding community. This site was not chosen at random. The children here already lived with disability. Their families understood the stakes. The trials succeeded. In April of nineteen fifty-five, the vaccine was declared safe and effective, touching off celebrations across the United States. Within years, a disease that had paralyzed or killed tens of thousands of Americans, many of them children, in its worst summers was effectively gone. It started here, in this western Pennsylvania valley.