page_title: Gini Laurie
section_title: Life, and Life's Work
hierarchical_section_title: Gini Laurie / Life, and Life's Work
caption_attribution_description: English: First "Gini" Conference, Chicago, Illinois First "GINI" conference, 1981. PHI archives.
context_page_description: Virginia Grace Wilson "Gini" Laurie was a central figure in the 20th century development, in the United States, of the independent living movement for people with disabilities. It is sometimes said that she was one of its two "grandmothers"—the other one being Mary Switzer, who was in charge of vocational rehabilitation at the national level from 1950 to 1970.
  Gini Laurie did her work entirely as a volunteer. From modest beginnings in the 1950s, she founded the organizations now known as Post-Polio Health International and the International Ventilator Users Network – organizations that remain vigorous continuations of her legacy. Through them she developed international networks of polio survivors and other people with physical disabilities, healthcare professionals in the field of rehabilitation, policymakers, and disability rights activists. She edited and published a newsletter that soon grew into an influential magazine called the Rehabilitation Gazette: International Journal of Independent Living by and for Persons with a Disability. During the 1980s, she organized international conferences to deal with the emerging crisis with post-polio syndrome.
context_section_description: Gini Laurie was born Virginia Grace Wilson, in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1913. The year before her birth, there was a nationwide polio epidemic, and its effect on her family explains a good deal about her later commitment to helping polio survivors.  She put it this way at the 1988 dedication of the new St. John's Rehabilitation Hospital in St. Louis:
  My father was a surgeon and on staff at the old Euclid Avenue St. John's [Hospital].  In 1912, the year before I was born, four siblings were struck by polio: a 12-year-old sister was mildly disabled, a 6-year-old brother very severely disabled, and two sisters, aged 3 and 9, died within days at St. John's. In their memory, my mother painted a mural on the ceiling of the St. John's chapel depicting them as angels.  Sixteen years later, I watched my significantly disabled brother die of pneumonia and underventilation at St. John's. His funeral mass was in St. John's Chapel, underneath the mural of our sisters. 
  She was named for the two sisters who died in that epidemic – Virginia, and Grace.  She was, as she sometimes put it, "a replacement child."  Her connections to disabling diseases, and in particular polio, went deep.
  In 1934, she received a B.A. degree in Latin and Greek (with Phi Beta Kappa honors) from Randolph-Macon Woman's College (now Randolph College) in Lynchburg, Virginia. She had gone to college with the intention of becoming a physician, but eventually abandoned that plan due to the obstacles women then faced in entering the profession.  At the age of 25, in 1938, she married Joseph Scott Laurie III, and they resided in St. Louis. She took a secretarial course, worked as a decorator at The Warfield Shop, and volunteered as an American Red Cross Gray Lady.
  Joe Laurie served in the army, and the couple traveled frequently during the war years. Late in the 1940s, his job as a chemist and salesman for a brewing company took them to Cleveland, Ohio. During the polio epidemic of 1949, Gini Laurie began to work around the edges of polio rehabilitation as an American Red Cross volunteer at the Toomey Pavilion at Cleveland's City Hospital,  later the twelfth of 15 Respiratory Care and Rehabilitation Centers funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes).
  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, severely compromised polio survivors, especially those with respiratory difficulties, were often hospitalized for many months, or even years.  Staff at such institutions relied heavily on volunteers to assist with patient services – reading, writing letters, and assisting therapists.  Patients often developed close bonds with each other, and with the staff and volunteers.  Those bonds were an important feature of their rehabilitation, but were often broken when patients were finally discharged. One of the things Laurie did as a volunteer at the Toomey Pavilion Center was to help publish its newsletter to alumni –  a newsletter that was circulated widely to patients at the 14 other respiratory rehabilitation centers in the US.
  What followed is described by Joan L. Headley, executive director of Post-Polio Health International:
  The [respiratory rehabilitation] centers, where individuals with severe polio in need of rocking beds and iron lungs were sent, provided superb medical and psychological rehabilitation but, until 1953, most of the permanent respirator users seemed doomed to remain in the hospital for the rest of their lives. In order to save money by avoiding lifelong hospitalization at the high daily rate of $37, Rancho Los Amigos Respiratory Center for Poliomyelitis in Downey, California, pioneered a system of home care that cost only $10 per day, and polio survivors were sent home with their iron lungs and chest cuirasses.
  Meanwhile, Gini Laurie [continued to volunteer at Toomey Pavilion], and kept up with her old polio pals who had gone home. Reflecting in her later years, Gini commented that it was  "apparent they [polio survivors] had two vital needs … people and information. They wanted to keep [up] with each other … and wanted to share informat
caption: First Post-Polio Conference, 1981 Chicago.  PHI  archives.
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