From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers, Our History, Your Story. In the first half of the 20th century,

terrified parents across America

braced for the arrival of summer, the start of polio season.

At the time, the illness was poorly understood, and the nation was desperate to find a way to protect against the so-called infantile paralysis.

While most people who became ill recovered, photographs of children in leg braces, using crutches, or confined to iron lungs, sent waves of

fear through communities across the country. But in the early 1950s, two scientists came to

define the race to develop a vaccine against polio, Jonas Salk, and Albert Sagan. And if you

ask people today who developed the polio vaccine, most will say Jonas Salk.

But SABIN created a vaccine too, one that proved crucial, though his name never earned

the same recognition. My guest today is working to change that. Karen Torgailey is an epidemiologist

and oral historian. Her book Albert Sabin, The Life of a Polio Vaccine Pioneer, is due to be published by Yale University Press in June of 26.

Our conversation is next.

Karen Torgailey, welcome to American History Tellers.

Thank you for having me.

So one of your earliest memories actually involves a polio outbreak in your own family.

I was wondering if you could share that story.

We lived in San Francisco when I was a child, and it was in the mid-1950s.

When just before the polio vaccine came out that Salk developed,

my brother was 12 and a half months older than me, so we were very close and good buddies.

He was three and a half and I was two and a half.

My first memory of anything is seeing him sitting on a table

with my dad moving his legs and asking him to move his legs and he was crying a lot. So because he

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