Home > History Fact Finder > Medicine and Disease - How Did Jonas Salk And Albert B. Sabin Save Lives?

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page

How did Jonas Salk and Albert B. Sabin save lives?

American physicians Jonas Salk (1914–1995) and Albert B. Sabin (1906– ) invented vaccines (substances introduced into the body in order to produce immunity to disease) to prevent poliomyelitis (called polio or infantile paralysis), an infection caused by a virus that attacks the central nervous system. Polio exists throughout the world, and in 1952 more than 21,000 cases of the most serious form of polio—paralytic polio—were reported in the United States alone. Polio sufferers were mainly children who, if they survived, might be paralyzed for life.

In 1953 Salk created a vaccine that contained the killed viruses of the three kinds of polio then known. Salk was so certain of the vaccine's safety that he tested it on himself and his family with great success. Then, with support from the March of Dimes (then called the National Foundation for...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

1. Origins
   1. How did early humans cure illness and disease?
   2. Who was the first doctor in history?
   3. What is the Hippocratic Oath?
   4. What are the four humors?
   5. When did biological warfare originate?
   6. Were there hospitals before the Middle Ages?
   7. When was the first North American hospital built?
   8. What advances were made in medicine during the Renaissance?
   9. How old is the concept of public health?
   10. What is Gray's Anatomy?
2. Modern Medicine
   1. When did modern medicine begin?
   2. Who invented vaccination?
   3. When did modern surgery begin?
   4. When was anesthesia first used?
   5. What surgical advances were introduced in the late twentieth century?
   6. Who introduced the use of antiseptics in hospitals?
   7. What are Louis Pasteur's contributions to the study of disease?
   8. When were antibiotics invented?
   9. Why are new antibiotics constantly being developed?
   10. Why is Florence Nightingale famous?
   11. When was the International Red Cross founded?
   12. Who discovered the X ray?
   13. Who was Clara Barton?
   14. What were the Curies' contributions to medicine?
   15. How did Jonas Salk and Albert B. Sabin save lives?
   16. When did the first heart transplant take place?
   17. When was the first test-tube baby born?
   18. When was the first kidney transplant?
   19. What is leprosy?
   20. What is the plague?
   21. Is yellow fever still a deadly disease?
   22. What was the first disease conquered by humans?
   23. Do scientists know when the AIDS virus first appeared?
   24. Who was Typhoid Mary?
   25. Has the flu ever reached epidemic proportions?
   26. What are CT and MRI scans?
3. Psychology
   1. Why are Pavlov's dogs famous?
   2. What is behaviorism?
   3. What were Sigmund Freud's contributions to the study of human psychology?
   4. What does the term "Jungian" mean?
   5. Who was Dorothea Dix
   6. What is depression?

1. Middle Ages