Polio Hall of Fame, Memorial sculpture at Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute, Georgia, United States.
The Polio Hall of Fame is a row of seventeen bronze busts mounted on a white marble wall at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute in Georgia, United States. Each bust portrays a person who contributed to polio research or care, and is paired with an explanatory plaque giving details about their role.
The monument was commissioned in 1958 by the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation to mark twenty years of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. It traces the key steps in understanding and controlling the disease, from the early 20th century through the development of a vaccine.
The busts honor both scientists and the organizers who made their work possible, with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Basil O'Connor as the only non-scientists represented. This makes the site one of the few memorials that places medical research and public leadership side by side.
The busts are mounted at eye level, so you can read the plaques without effort as you walk along the wall. It helps to go slowly and read each one in order, since the full story becomes clearer as you move from one person to the next.
Among those honored are pioneers from both Europe and North America, showing that the fight against the disease crossed national borders long before it was brought under control. One of the most recently honored at the time of the display's creation was Jonas Salk, whose vaccine had only just been announced a few years before the monument was made.
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