“They’re afraid to come into Cork. Alderman Casey, the Lord Mayor of Cork, said the report was beneath contempt, adding, “Press publicity, which is ill-advised and ill-informed, has done immeasurable damage to the traders of the city.” An irate councillor played the patriotic card, saying British papers “were not slow to publish anything which tended to discredit the Irish people”. There are no Independent Premium comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts Its symbol was less the coffin than the wheelchair, like that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who caught polio in 1921, the “iron lung” to enable victims to breath, and callipers and crutches to help them walk. At the height of the epidemic Dr Gerard McCarthy, the medical officer for Cork county, pointed this out, saying: “The higher the standard of living, the greater the tendency towards the disease. Every few days a nurse would point to the door of the ward and I could see my parents waving from the other side of a glass porthole.A few days later my brother Andrew joined me. It was a horrible place. We lived well, but were permanently short of money. try again, the name must be unique Unlike typhus or cholera, it mainly hit the middle classes rather than the poor. But people in Cork believed there were many more. A keen sportsman from Dungarvan, a town by the sea in the neighbouring county of Waterford, got polio in February, 1956. “I hope I never have to lay down,” he says, “because I know my body will have a hard time getting back up.” St. Joseph Communications uses cookies for personalization, to customize its online advertisements, and for other purposes. Dr McCarthy said: “If I had my way, apart from isolating in hospital every case detected, I would take no other elaborate precautions.” People in Cork - and this was also true of other epidemics in New York and Copenhagen - could not quite take on board the fact that thousands of them were getting polio, but in 85 per cent of cases they showed no symptoms. It is an old disease. The ambulance took me to St Finbarr’s, the fever hospital, a converted grey stone 19th-century workhouse on the south side of the city. “What the patients do when there’s something they want, they click their tongue,” Herbert explains.
We had not mixed enough with other children to acquire immunity. “We’re so understaffed,” she told him. He’d never been trained for such a situation; supposedly, there was a backup generator that would prevent a blackout from shutting the medical equipment down. Ironically my parents never realised that the very isolation of Brook Lodge, which they counted on to protect their children, put us in greater danger. Luckily, he was right. We reached Cork docks late in the morning and mountains of luggage were packed into a van. Herbert Ingenkamp on being an orderly during the polio epidemic. My legs were covered in plaster casts and itched mercilessly. They wanted the games cancelled.
My father had immediately telephoned the school to tell the headmaster to send him home. A nurse is with young polio patients at the University Hospital in Edmonton, AB. continue to respect all commenters and create constructive debates. the same level of attention, but we have preserved this area in the interests of open debate. The city corporation was enraged. But at the end of the 19th century polio took on a new and more menacing form. Having immigrated from a flood-struck Holland mere months ago with little English—and only five dollars—he struck up a conversation in his native language. I sensed the anxiety of the people standing in the driveway by the back door of the ambulance and sobbed louder.I was extremely frightened. They believed, so my father sardonically recorded, that “due to the savage wiles and intrigues of the Dubliners, the newspapers had been, as the Irish saying goes, ‘brought to see’ that it would not be in their interests to report the state of affairs in Dublin. It struck at individuals. Over the years I noticed that very little appeared about the epidemic in Irish history books, even though it paralysed the second- largest city in the country for a year. With a population of only 75,000 it was an intimate, close-knit community. In deputation to the newspapers they threatened to withdraw advertising from such periodicals as might continue to report regularly and in detail on the polio epidemic there.” A British Sunday paper described Cork as “a city in panic”. My father wrote a moving chapter about his two sons getting the disease in the third volume of his autobiography View From The West (1961). It was 10 in the morning, and about half the wing’s staff was downstairs getting a coffee, when all power suddenly went out—shutting down the respirators. They turned back all cars with children under the age of 16. I spent days happily, but ineffectively, trying to dam one of the streams with pebbles and mud. The house had been built partly with defence in mind during the Irish land wars with long stone walls on one side and two fast-flowing streams on the other. There are no comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts By then polio was being rapidly eradicated. News about the outbreak was sparse, but the risk seemed small. In Cork most of the victims were in the relatively prosperous southern suburbs and not the terrible slums in the north of the city.