Word: polio
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Berg wrote his concerto in 1935 after the death of Manon Gropius, the beloved daughter of his friend Alma Mahler and the architect Walter Gropius. The girl died at 19 of polio and the composer dedicated the work "to the memory of an angel." Robbins' scenario begins quietly and a bit flatly as Farrell moves with increasing stiffness and bafflement between her lover (tenderly danced by Joseph Duell) and friends. Suddenly they move off and she is left with a gauntly beautiful angel of death (Adam Luders). Their pas de deux is the heart of the ballet. The moves...
...other modern Presidents came to be seriously isolated. Franklin Roosevelt's mobility was restricted by his polio and then by wartime security. For Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, political adversity, in the form of Viet Nam and Watergate, made it painful to move around much in the country. (Four decades earlier, Herbert Hoover had suffered similar imprisonment by the Depression; he was not much of a mixer even in good times.) Nixon and Jimmy Carter were more or less reclusive Presidents by temperament. Reagan's curiosity is well contained. Eisenhower was somewhat less gregarious than the famous grin suggested...
...polio survivors, it is particularly disheartening, years after recovering, to find that again they cannot climb stairs or even comb their ! hair. Until recently, doctors frequently thought that these postpolio victims were imagining their problems. But as more people began to experience the same crippling aftereffects, it became apparent that PPMA was a physical disorder common to approximately 15% to 20% of former polio patients...
...first, doctors suspected that the polio virus had somehow remained latent in PPMA victims, only to be reactivated. But unlike polio, PPMA is never fatal, and it progresses far more slowly than the original disease. That would seem to rule out the polio virus as the culprit. A more likely cause may be the toll taken on healthy nerve cells by years of overcompensating for those destroyed by the disease. Many polio survivors, says Perry, "are functioning at 50% of their muscle strength most of the time, whereas healthy people stay under 20%." For this reason, the nerve cells...
...recurring symptoms. Many are able to continue most of their ordinary activities with the help of lightweight braces and portable respirators. Institute doctors also recommend that they simply rest more, which enables them to conserve the energy to carry on. This prescription is alien to most of the patients. "Polio survivors are very strong people," says Frederick Maynard, director of the post-polio clinic at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor. "It goes against their whole approach to life to suddenly take the easy way out." But once they do, he says, "they often feel much better...