Black Bird Fly Away: Disabled in an Able-Bodied World

by Geoffrey C. Ward and Hugh Gregory Gallagher

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0918339448
• ISBN13: 9780918339447
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Vandamere Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Blackbird Fly Away

What a wonderful honest account of the struggles of a man, Hugh Gregory Gallagher who at his peak suffered a tremendous loss as a result of polio. Yet in spite of it, and in part because Mr. Gallagher was blessed with a smart mind and strong spirit, overcame the obstacles, making a statement to society about his worth as a human being, as he pursued his dreams, then ultimately made the world a better place for thosewith disabilities. As a polio survivor and one who is facing the challenges of the late effects of post polio, I applaud Mr. Gallagher for his courage and have read and re-read his book to help me gain my strength and courage to face the challenges before me.

Gallagher's polio battles, losses and victories.

From Jack Trombadore Book Reviews New Jersey Polio Network NEWSLETTER, Fall, 1998.In this collection of essays, journals, writings and personal recollections spanning almost half a century, Hugh Gallagher courageously reveals himself in a compelling autobiography as both protagonist and antagonist in a drama with countless scenes in three acts. Throughout the first two acts he forces himself to overcome the role of emotional anti-hero until he achieves final freedom from the talons of clinical depression at the beginning of a long, ongoing and productive third act. Stricken with severe paralytic polio at nineteen, Gallagher never walked again. A freshman at Haverford in the spring of 1952, he was young, beautiful and free; he was in love with a beautiful girl, the novels of Thomas Mann, Italian opera, politics, and with life. He was young, strong and invincible. Polio, My Account, was written twenty years "after the event" and never previously published. Here, he tells us what it "felt" like to have had a life sentence of disability imposed without hope of pardon or parole. The physiological aspects of his polio were just representative of the inward tragedy of the collapse of a young life. He saw himself watching his own deterioration from outside his body. He saw the horrific progression of the disease the first days: legs, trunk, breathing, arms, hands, neck, double and quadruple vision, the tracheotomy on a body too weak for anesthetics, the rush down corridors in the arms of non-medical personnel to the iron lung, the108 degree fever, last rites. His body was the battlefield for the doctors and his presence was "accidental." No one disclosed what his ravaged body would be like if they succeeded in keeping him alive. The overwhelming question became: stop or go, yes or no, live or die. He decided to live.After a year in hospitals, he was admitted to the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia. He spent nine months there, learning the "functional" tricks of the trade that would enable him again to live in the outside world. He was physically independent, healthy and in a wheelchair. He still is.He obtained his American B.A. in 1956 from Claremont McKenna College in California. It was the only college of the forty to which he had written that was fully accessible. His first application for a Rhodes Fellowship to Oxford was returned unprocessed; Gallagher was not "fit in mind and body" as required by the will of Cecil Rhodes. His was the first application Oxford had ever received from a disabled person. However, he did attend Oxford with a Marshall Fellow scholarship and studied there for three years at Trinity College, the only one of Oxford's thirty-five individual colleges that was "wheelchair accessible." He was the only person at Oxford in a wheelchair. There he endured unbelievable hardships.The water closet was a block away, down a ramp and up a ramp, nearly always slippery fro