The Collaborative International Dictionary
Infantile paralysis \In"fan*tile pa*ral"y*sis\ (Med.) An acute viral disease, affecting almost exclusively infants and young adults, characterized by inflammation of the anterior horns of the gray substance of the spinal cord. It is attended with febrile symptoms, motor paralysis, and muscular atrophy, often producing permanent deformities. Called also acute anterior poliomyelitis, poliomyelitis and polio. It is caused by any one of three polioviruses, and by the end of the twentieth century had been almost completely eradicated in developed countries by a widespread campaign of immunization.
WordNet
n. an acute viral disease marked by inflammation of nerve cells of the brain stem and spinal cord [syn: poliomyelitis, polio, acute anterior poliomyelitis]
Usage examples of "infantile paralysis".
It isn't my husband who's been struck down with infantile paralysis!
A few weeks after Christmas he was able to go outside for limited airings, but he was not anxious to attract attention from Nosy Parkers who would want to know why he was in the streets when all decent boys were either in school, or at home with infantile paralysis, or simply with swollen glands.
Sharon Carter is now nineteen, very pretty and vivacious, but so badly crippled by an attack of infantile paralysis during childhood that she can walk only with crutches.
Statistical Contributions to the Study of Infantile Paralysis in England and Wales, 1894.
Skinny Dix got infantile paralysis--and would lie in bed, watching the street corner beyond the window, waiting for Ellsworth.
They were called iron lungs and were used for people who couldn't breathe, like patients in the nineteen-fifties with infantile paralysis.