Street Kids, Poster Children, and Enfermitos: Poliomyelitis in Argentina

In early 1956, just months after a military-led coup d’état unseated President Juan Perón, Argentina suffered its worst polio epidemic on record. Although the new government capitalized on the outbreak to separate its political agenda from that of their predecessor, this paper uses visual representations of the outbreak as starting points to discuss how both government and citizen responses to the epidemic were not merely marking a political turning point. In particular, trends in Argentine social assistance programs, long-standing narratives used to explain the spread of disease, and the antipolio movement in the United States influenced the response to polio in Argentina