Technology and non-orthodox treatments at the serviceof children with polio. Compassion as a transforming po-wer.

Abstract

The presence of epidemic outbreaks of poliomyelitis in the initialand central decades of the twentieth century constituted a ma-jor public health problem aggravated by affecting children, thelack of effective treatments and by paralytic sequelae. The ob-jective of the work is to analyse some of the responses that werecarried out from health professional fields and alternative hete-rodox approaches in the most critical stages of the epidemic, indifferent places and that, among other factors, they were moti-vated by a compassionate approach. This study follows the typi-cal methdological approach in a sicentifc historical study, witha critical use of primary sources and of their contextualized in-terpretation.. The main results provide a wealth of empirical in-formation on the importance of compassion in the developmentof the specific measures adopted . The conclusions point to adirect cause-effect relationship in interventions such as the ironlungs or the Kenny method in order to alleviate and improve thequality of life of children in the stage prior to the developmentof polio vaccination