Jonas Salk:
History of Polio
Micheal Underwood was an English physician that first discovered the disease polio. Mr. Underwood described it as "a debility of the lower extremities." The original name of the poliovirus wasn't called polio, around the mid 1800s it was known as Heine-Medin disease. In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation's history. Nearly 58,000 cases reported that year 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling cases.