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From the
Tuskegee News:
When she came to Tuskegee University as a nursing instructor 1986, Dr. Edie Powell said a rare instance of déjà vu came over her.
The familiar image of a glistening pool stirred in her mind, and when she couldn’t place the memory, she asked Dr. John F. Hume what her new building used to hold.
His answer was the Tuskegee Institute Infantile Paralysis Facility — a place where Powell was consulted as a child and that would later be the focus of book composed by herself and Hume.
The book, “A Black Oasis,” documents Tuskegee Institute’s fight against infantile paralysis and details the rehabilitation and treatment of its black American patients in a segregated South.
Powell shared portions of her book, anecdotes from her childhood and photographs from the facility as a guest speaker for Black History Month at Tuskegee University on February 4.
Powell said the general lack of knowledge people had about the old facility made writing the book and sharing it at the university a no-brainer.
“I’ve asked all these people what this building was,” she told Hume. “And they don’t know. They don’t know anything about this polio center. It ‘ought to be recorded.”
The facility, founded in 1941, was born on the back of Dr. John Chenault, one of the pioneers in disproving the widely accepted notion at the time that Negro children could not contract polio.
Chenault made it a personal mission to establish a specialized treatment facility for black American children with the virus.
In 1944, Powell began complaining about severe leg cramps, which prompted her parents to get an opinion from Chenault, a family friend.
“Daddy brought me out here (to the facility) to see Dr. Chenault because he knew him, and he knew he was the polio expert,” Powell said.
According to Powell, Chenault told her parent’s he believed Powell had the polio virus, but couldn’t treat her at the Tuskegee facility because it was strictly for black patients.
After being diagnosed with polio, Powell received treatment in Warm Springs, Ga.
But from her brief visit at the Tuskegee Institute at age 4, she recalls the rehabilitation pool, the breathing noises of iron lungs and children with braces on their legs.
She too wore a brace on her right leg that connected to a plate on the bottom of a white pair of high-tops.
By first grade, Powell said she was free of the leg brace and participating in athletic activities.
Years down the road, she enrolled in Auburn University to study as a physical therapist. Her diagnosis, treatment and proximity to the work at the Tuskegee Institute played heavily into her career choice, she said.
“Those were the people that I thought had worked with me when I was in Warm Springs,” she said about physical therapists. “(That) made me think that’s what I could do to help people.”
After more than 20 years working in hospitals filling various positions, Powell returned to her native Tuskegee to teach at the university’s School of Nursing and Allied Health before retiring in May 2008.
From the Tuskegee News:
