Franklin D. Roosevelt's paralytic illness

Franklin D. Roosevelt's paralytic illness began in 1921, when the future President of the United States was 39 years of age and vacationing with his family at their summer home on Campobello Island. Roosevelt was diagnosed with poliomyelitis two weeks after he fell ill. He was left with permanent paralysis from the waist down, and was unable to stand or walk without support. Despite the lack of a cure for paralysis he tried a wide range of therapies, and his belief in the benefits of hydrotherapy led him to found a center at Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1926. He laboriously taught himself to walk very short distances while wearing iron braces on his hips and legs by swiveling his torso, supporting himself with a cane, and he was careful never to be seen using his wheelchair in public. His bout with illness was well known before and during his Presidency and became a major part of his image, but the extent of his paralysis was kept from public view. A 2003 retrospective diagnosis of FDR's illness favored Guillain–Barré syndrome rather than polio, a conclusion criticized by other researchers.

In August 1921, 39-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the time a practicing lawyer in New York, joined his family at their vacation home at Campobello, a Canadian island off the coast of Maine. Several weeks before, his wife Eleanor had moved the household—including five children aged 5–15, a governess and her mother, and 40 to 50 trunks—to the remote island for the summer-long vacation. As he usually did, Roosevelt stayed behind until things got settled. As former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he spent two weeks in Washington, D.C., giving testimony to a Senate committee investigating a Navy scandal in mid-July. On July 28 he fulfilled a commitment associated with his recently being elected president of the Greater New York Council of the Boy Scouts. He spent the following day in his New York City office, then went to his home in Hyde Park to review old Navy papers. A few days later, on August 5, FDR sailed up the New England coast with his friend and new employer, Van Lear Black, on Black's ocean-going yacht. Among those at Campobello when Roosevelt arrived were his political aide Louis Howe, his wife and their young son.

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