Facilities at the clinic include a pool where newly crippled children learn to walk, and a rocking bed which sways back and forth to aid in breathing. There is also an exercise room--furnished with stairs, the model of a public bus, and ping-pong tables.

Besides the physical aspects of the disease, University doctors study the possibilities of epidemic outbreaks and the psychological effects of the disease on families of patients.

Dr. Theodore H. Ingalls, an epidemiologist in the School of Public Health, recently conducted a survey on the likeliness of a polio outbreak in an average camp or boarding school. He found that the ordinary establishment need not expect such an outbreak more than once a century.

The reason for the occurrence of many cases at about the same time, says Ingalls, is simultaneous exposure to the virus rather than the spread from person to person. Ingalls and his colleagues believe the disease may behave like measles or scarlet fever. In this case, the contamination of milk or food may account for epidemics, as it does with those diseases.

Finally, Miss Elizabeth P. Rice, assistant professor of Medical Social Works, does exhaustive studies on the families of children who are stricken.

She discovered that people whose children have polio are frequently shunned by others in the community who fear they may catch the virus. This feeling is due, she said, to the publicity the disease gets during an epidemic, with accounts of the death and injuries inflicted, and no mention of the large number of recoveries made.

The virus itself is as old as civilization, and epidemics have been known to occur only in civilized countries. Scientists have ascertained its presence in mummies taken from ancient Egyptian tombs. They attribute the cause to the highly perfected sanitary arrangements in civilized societies. Among savage groups, where sanitation is not developed, children get exposed to the disease early and in small amounts, thus building up an immunity.

Whether this method could be introduced in modern machine is something doctors have been wondering for a long time. A vaccine to immunize everyone at birth, similar to the smallpox vaccine, is still a dream, but in the laboratories of the Medical and Public Health Schools are test tubes which may contain the answer