Polio and Disability in Cold War Hungary

Abstract

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.

Beyond Mortality

“…The form these communities and impacts took depended on local and, particularly in the twentieth century, national contexts. In Cold War Hungary, for example, the ideas and values of modernity, industry, and production shaped the rehabilitative treatment of polio survivors, with training for specific trades (Vargha 2018b). Similar to work offered in other institutional rehabilitative settings, these trades consisted of watch repair and shoemaking for boys and men, and work in the prosthetics factory for girls and women (Vargha 2018b).…”

“…In Cold War Hungary, for example, the ideas and values of modernity, industry, and production shaped the rehabilitative treatment of polio survivors, with training for specific trades (Vargha 2018b). Similar to work offered in other institutional rehabilitative settings, these trades consisted of watch repair and shoemaking for boys and men, and work in the prosthetics factory for girls and women (Vargha 2018b). Furthermore, Vargha (2018a) describes the formation of a civil society in the late 1970s by Hungarian polio survivors who drew on their institutional networks developed during their long periods in the hospital.…”

“…Among Gallagher's extensive contributions to disability rights in the United States (see his autobiography [Gallagher 1998], as well as discussion in Altenbaugh 2015), as a Senate staffer, he drafted the Federal Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, which required that all public buildings, or those in which physically impaired individuals might reside or work, financed with federal funds be designed and constructed in accordance with prescribed accessibility standards (Architectural Barriers Act 1968). Similarly in Hungary, polio survivors were instrumental in the establishment of the National Federation of Disabled Persons' Associations (MEOSZ), the country's largest nongovernmental organization for representing and advocating disability rights (Vargha 2018b). Polio survivors were thus at the center of twentieth-century changes to the built environment for physical accessibility and increased representation of disabled people during decision-making affecting them.…”