Polio outbreak 1950s

While researching what put me in Keresley hospital when I was 5 years old, I remembered a similar experience to Slim's. I fell ill soon after the Coronation and when I did not recover my bed was brought downstairs to the living room because I could not walk properly. A visit from the school attendance officer finally brought one from a locum GP as our usually caring Dr Singh of Ansty Road had been away during my illness. I was taken straight away to see Dr Parry-Williams at the Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital where it was found my right leg was shorter than the left and I had a collapsed lung. He said this was probably caused by polio but I had got over the fever and did not need isolation at Whitley Hospital. I spent the next month or two in Keresley Hospital strapped tightly to the mattress in a barred cot, head down at a 30 degree inclination to drain my lungs. The only respite was to receive physiotherapy to strengthen my muscles. I did not start school again until the middle of the autumn term. Like Slim, I made a nearly complete physical recovery but unlike Slim I can remember the trauma of separation from family and unsympathetic treatment by some of the nurses who as cadets had started nursing at 17 and had no experience of caring for young children (Coventry accepted them into training a year before elsewhere). Apparently, polio infects as many as a hundred times more than those who it left with paralysis, many would not have any symptoms. It grows in the gut and is passed by contact with faeces and spreads easily among young children. Only those unlucky enough for the virus to enter the blood stream and attack the spinal cord and brainstem suffered paralysis. Holding hands while lining up at school, sharing books and toys were probably more to blame for spreading polio than the River Sowe that took the blame for the 1957 outbreak. The Coventry Evening telegraph reports 104 cases of polio, 60 paralytic, on 24 August 1957. There were probably many more that were not serious enough to attract medical attention. In 1953, my year, there were 415 paralytic cases in Warwickshire that then included Coventry and a large part of Birmingham. If you had recovered from polio it was still necessary to have the vaccine because there are three strains of the virus. I had my sugar lump in a church hall at Spon End in 1962.

Strangely enough, polio epidemics actually increased with better housing and sanitation. Polio was endemic before the 20th century and communities had herd immunity passed on by breast feeding. Of course this did not apply to TB, scarlet fever, diptheria, etc.

There's a memory for me! My grandmother, May Bicknell, used to work as a cleaner at Dr Singh's house on Ansty Road. I was only four or five at the time, but I remember meeting him.