Every city had a hospital filled with iron lungs where people received round the clock care.
Hardly a family was untouched by this horrible disease that left so many permanently paralyzed or crippled for life. I personally had two cousins and a classmate who contracted the illness.   One was left permanently disabled.  Though the disease did strike adults too, it was far more prevalent in children.  At its very worst, it could shut down the respiratory system, forcing people to live their lives in iron lungs.

The frightening thing was that no one knew how the disease spread.  Parents were at a loss as to how to protect their children.

We all freely gave our dimes and more--children and parents alike--to the March of Dimes to fund research to find a cure or a vaccine against it.
March of Dimes cards sat in restaurants, drug stores, and many other places to remind people to give their change.
In 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk, working at the University of Pittsburgh and funded by the March of Dimes, believed he had found a vaccine after eight long years of trial and error.  

He tested it on his own family and they immediately began developing antibodies against the disease.
When he announced it to the world, within months health officials began arriving at public schools to immunize children. 

They had no idea how effective it was going to be. However, the public began demanding that their children be given the shot just as soon as possible.

I still remember when they arrived at my school and I received the first of three immunizations.
Because the vaccine was a dead virus, it posed no threat of actually causing the person to develop polio.  Later, a live virus that could be given orally was developed, which actually did cause a few people to contract the disease.
Salk refused to patent his discovery, stating that he did not want to make money from it.  He wanted it readily available everywhere to protect children.

Oddly enough, because he built his research on previous research of other scientists and never publicly gave them credit. a jealousy developed in the medical community and he never received the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Nonetheless, he became an instant hero to parents around the world.  Today polio only poses a threat in a few African and Asian locales where people are still not widely vaccinated.