Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Editor's Note
Mrs. Donnelly has certainly caught and recorded in a word picture "The Spirit of Warm Springs." Perhaps the explanation of her ability to do this so readily is that she belongs to the Polio fraternity, having suffered Infantile Paralysis several years ago.

MOST of the things worth doing in this world have to be done, steadily, for a long time. . . . Some six hundred people, during the last five years, have found this out as members of the Colony at the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation.

To the stranger riding up from the 7:12 train after dark, Meriwether Inn at the Springs might be any old-time hostelry in any quiet mountain resort of the Eastern States. There is a quick impression of cottages, of porch lights, laughter and singing -- the sort of thing to be found all summer long in the Adirondacks, the Berkshires, the Catskills, the White Mountains, wherever an old hotel has welcomed country -- loving folk for fifty years and more. There are the broad, vine-hung verandas, the porch chairs, a great lighted dining room with colored waiters scurrying about and a captain drawing chairs; a row of parked automobiles with state licenses from far and near, and, impertinently modern under the ancient trees, a midget golf course.

All this you glimpse and find familiar.

Then you see the wheel chairs, a whole fleet of them, pushed by friendly hands or sent spinning along by the occupants themselves. Wheel chairs for the most part filled with Youth -- children, girls in their 'teens and their twenties; stalwart chaps who might be -- and have been -- college athletes. There are older people, too, both men and women, shoving the chairs which make getting about the hotel and its grounds a simple matter for those who cannot walk. You see crutches in use, and canes, and braces. But not for a moment do you find anything which seems like a sanitarium or a hospital. There is, when you come and when you go, and all the while you've stayed, the spirit of a country club or a hotel at some popular resort. Serious as is the work carried on -- strictly scientific as is every part of the procedure, there is, someway, nothing institutional, nothing oppressively "organized." The machinery of routine is kept almost incredibly human. There seems only a simple, common-sense schedule for the day's hard work-out, then every chance for rest and recreation in the grove of pines and oaks where the Foundation family, has its habitation.

There are two usual words in constant use about the Inn and cottages which hit the ear at once. They are "Polio" and "Physio."

Polio is a contraction of the jaw-breaking Anterior Poliomyelitis, the scientific term for the disease of Infantile Paralysis, which no lay person is sure about spelling or pronouncing correctly. There is something jolly about the brief Polio. It sounds like a game, and it is played like a game at Warm Springs. With every rule of the true sportsman.

Polio is the reason for the Warm Springs Foundation and its swimming pools. The story of this development is widely known. It has to do with the illness, ten years ago, of Franklin D. Roosevelt, now Governor of New York. At a summer camp in Maine, Poliomyelitis, as the doctors wrote it in their records, struck him down as it strikes down thousands of persons in the United States each year. True to its grim form it left him unable to walk. In his search for exercise which would bring back power of locomotion he learned of benefit received by a fellow sufferer from the same disease who had kept up swimming and exercising in the waters of Warm Springs. Mr. Roosevelt tried the experiment. He noticed real improvement. Eager to discover the effects in a number of people, he brought to Warm Springs an orthopedic specialist, a physiotherapist, trained in the most scientific form of exercise in use for this form of paralysis, and twenty-six persons who were victims of the disease. Each individual showed improvement after treatment in the water.

Convinced that benefit was there, Mr. Roosevelt set out to raise funds to develop the present fine plant which is the objective of many motor trips by visitors from all over the South. After more than a year of experimental work there was incorporated the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation designed as a center for the study and after-treatment of Infantile Paralysis. A number of prominent men consented to act as Trustees and the Foundation is conducted as a public trust entirely without profit.

The spring water gushes down from the hills at a warm temperature the year round and to insure swimming and exercising with comfort during the winter months a glass-enclosed swimming pool has been installed and the temperature of the air made as comfortable as that of the water.

It is at the pools the "Physios" preside. In the terminology of the MDs they are physiotherapists, people who administer physiotherapy. Therapy for the Greek word meaning healing. Physio -- physical. There you have it. At Warm Springs it is hydro therapy, or water therapy.