Word: poliovirus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Roosevelt's optimism about medical research seems, in retrospect, amazing. Doctors could not prevent or treat the poliovirus infection that had paralyzed him nearly twenty years earlier. John Franklin Enders and vaccines were still in the future; the main therapies were iron lungs and warm baths. Most of the staples of modern medicine were also still unknown. Antibiotics. Hormone replacements. Effective drug therapies for psychotic illnesses. Pre-natal testing. Coronary bypass surgery and artifical joints. Also in the future were medications that could have lowered FDR's blood pressure and perhaps forestalled the stroke that killed him less than five...