The Journée Nationale des Paralysés and the French Poster Child (or Why I Started Doing Research on Ebay)

These two posters, created by the Association des Paralyss de France for the Journe Nationale des Paralyss et Infirmes Civils, feature three compelling images of disabled children.In the first poster, we see two young girls, perhaps five for six years old.One wears orthopedic shoes and a leg brace.Each girl balances on a cane while raising her hand in the air, as if in a gesture of victory."You who walk, help us," the poster implores.In the second, a young girl sits with her canes crossed over her legs, looking toward the camera with a shy smile on her face.Flanked by the bleu, blanc, rouge of the French flag, she reminds viewers that contributing to the rehabilitation of children with polio on the Journe Nationale is not only a gesture of solidarity, but a national duty.When I first began researching polio in France, I expected to find images like these everywhere.Instead, I was regularly met with the somewhat baffling question "La polio?C'tait un problme ici?"As the child of American parents born in the late 1940s, I grew up hearing stories about polio: my father standing in line to receive the vaccine; my mother's cousin Jim walking with braces.When visiting my grandmother in rural Alabama, we often drove by the highway exit for Warm Springs, Georgia, where the former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt purchased a hydrotherapy facility to treat his own polio, later turning it into a rehabilitation center for patients from across the United States.To finance Warm Springs, Roosevelt and Basil O'Connor created the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP), colloquially known as the March of Dimes.From the mid-1930s onward, the March of Dimes used "poster children" to fundraise for polio treatment and scientific research leading to a polio vaccine. 1 By mobilizing Americans to donate ten-cent coins to "cure" polio, the March of Dimes became a model 1