Rose Russell O’Donovan might be interested in this memoir I wrote for the UCC Medical Alumni Newsletter recently in view of her reminiscences of her experiences in the Cork Polio epidemic she recently published in Youghal Online. A short precis was published in the recent Holly Bough.

Paul O’Brien MB

A MEMOIR OF THE PLAGUE YEAR.
The memories came back when reading Patrick Cockburn’s book

‘The Broken Boy’.Son of the gadfly journalist and scourge of the British Establishment Claude Cockburn, dedicated Communist, editor of ‘The Week’ , godfather of ‘Private Eye’ and a Battalion Commander in the Spanish Civil War, young Patrick was a victim  in the Cork polio epidemic of 1956, one of the last great outbreaks of that enemy of the mostly very young.
Photo: Michael Hussey www.youghalonline.com E mail news@youghalonline.com

His father had brought the family to a house near his mother’s people’s place close to Youghal from England.  Though well aware that the epidemic was raging in Cork that August, Cockburn thought that they would be safe there though he continued to travel through the city on his journeys to and from England.  He seems to have experienced minor symptoms of the disease himself shortly before his two sons became ill.

Now a distinguished journalist in his own right specializing in Middle East affairs, Patrick wrote of his recollections of his illness in a book which also provides insights into the Ascendancy lifestyle lived by his mother’s family.  Both polio and the Ascendancy are now fast fading memories for Irish people. Polio succumbed to advances in Medicine. The Ascendancy class started off their long decline  to oblivion by supporting the Act of Union; subsequently they obstinately continued to back the wrong political horse  in Ireland and now have either fled their country or been married out of existence.  A fine literature riven by a haunting schizoid vein of manque Irishness is their sole if substantial legacy.

In the Spring of 1956 I was relieved and somewhat surprised to pass the dreaded 2nd Medical exams which opened up a long Summer to be lived at will.  In the relaxed atmosphere of the times one could no longer flunk out as there was now no deadline for passing the exams in the Clinical years of the course.  Proof of this was offered by the appearance now and again in College of some legendary ‘chronic meds’,  including a mysterious lady known as ‘The Cuckoo’ due to her habit of showing up from England in Spring with the avowed purpose of sitting Finals but never actually getting around to it.  Her appearance was always taken seriously by the current final year students as it signalled that the time to really get down to serious study had arrived.

As Teaching rounds were held at the various hospitals in the morning followed by formal lectures at UCC in the afternoon a motorized mode of transport was essential, especially if one wanted to stop for lunch downtown while en route from the North Infirmary, where the bedside teaching clinics of the elegant O.T.D. Loughnane in Medicine and the popular and saturnine ‘K Jack’ Kiely in Surgery were eagerly attended .  A quiet pint with a half dozen oysters could be had inexpensively at Hoare’s bar in a laneway near the Examiner Office.  This was felt to be a necessity by some of us to withstand the boredom caused by one of the senior lecturers whose idea of teaching was to read passages out of fairly basic textbooks and indicate where he personally did’nt agree with the author now and again.

To raise the necessary cash to buy wheels I hied off to London to  Wall’s Ice Cream factory, where by working the night shift in the huge storage freezers, one could fairly rapidly acquire significant funds if one did’nt get involved in the perpetual poker games ongoing day and night.  On return I bought the famous Hackett Special,a black sinister-looking mainly Triumph 350 twin motorbike put together by medical student Tom Hackett and Physiology lab technologist Johnny Cagney from the cannibalized remains of two  crashed bikes.  It served  faithfully until one wet day in the County Limerick when it mysteriously caught fire under me as I was blasting along a road near Caherconlish while up in Limerick doing an elective with the respected Dr John Nash ,Physician Superintendent at the Regional Hospital.

When I got back to Cork the polio epidemic was in full swing. Over its course over 500 patients, mostly children , were admitted to hospital within less than four months.  The public health authorities had forecast an increased number of cases of polio that Summer but not an epidemic.  As polio attacks about 100 patients for every one it brings down with visible symptoms  it meant that in Cork with its then population of 75 000 there could have been possibly up to 50 000 affected.  Though the vast majority of these were symptom-free they could have been potential carriers of the virus for a time.  In anticipation of an outbreak the authorities had designated some hospitals as polio reception centres though apparently no attempt was made to import and use the newly released Salk polio vaccine which was soon to obliterate the disease in the Western world.  The old Fever Hospital in Blackpool was recommissioned and the Fever Hospital block in St Finbarres was readied with a respiratory intensive care unit containing various artificial respirators for the most seriously ill patients suffering from respiratory paralysis.

This is where we got involved;  in a prior outbreak in Copenhagen volunteer medical students had been called upon to manually ventilate some patients,either because of a shortage of iron lungs or victims who for one reason or another could not adapt to them.  In St Finbarre’s there was a little girl who fell in to this latter category. A call went out for volunteers to help the overworked nursing staff by working mainly night shifts to manually ventilate her.  Several of the Class who would go on to graduate in 1959/60 came forward.

A rota was organized to cover the required shifts .  Among the volunteers was the late Dr.Noel McCarthy, son of the then Cork County Medical Officer of Health.  Though the public health doctors came in for criticism by Patrick Cockburn, Dr. McCarthy had no hesitation in letting Noel volunteer.  Others were Raymond Hegarty, Jerry O’Connell (RIP), Olive O’Donoghue, Ben Meade (who went back to his digs after one shift only to find his personal belongings neatly piled outside the door with a polite note from the landlady asking him to make himself scarce) and Elizabeth Healy, also asked to vacate her lodgings at short notice.

Another volunteer was my friend the late John Joe Kelly who was on holidays from TCD at the time; John Joe was the only one of us to come down with symptoms of the disease but luckily it was not the paralytic variant. Other volunteers  included John A. Kelly whose father UCC graduate Surgeon Lieutenant Kelly had been lost at sea in WW II when the hospital ship ‘Ceramic’ was torpedoed. Prominent UCC graduate  Michael B. O’Sullivan, who would go on to become Director of Laboratories at the Mayo Clinic, was also one of the youthful group of idealists..

We were given a crash course on how to manually ventilate the little girl whose name was Margot via a bag was connected to a tracheostomy .We  did alternating two-hour stints of regularly compressing it, interrupted only by aspirating secretions when necessary .I still recall the subdued lighting of the special unit with the silence regularly broken by the hiss of the iron lungs . Margot would gaze at us steadily as we kept her going; she had incredible fortitude and did eventually recover enough function as to manage largely breathing on her own.  Later while doing clinics at the  Orthopaedic Hospital in Gurranebraher she greeted us from the rehab Unit where she then was. One of the patients in an iron lung was Michael who hailed from Waterford; he had developed the habit of attempting to cough to attract the attention of the nurse looking after him  for fear she might nod off.  Raymond Hegarty remembers manually ventilating a little girl with a sad and tragic history.  Her mother had sent her to relatives in Skibbereen to avoid the epidemic; there she cut herself while tree climbing and developed tetanus; now she was in the unit suffering from respiratory paralysis and also being bagged.  Sadly she died.

Towards the end of September our services were no longer needed and without fuss or fanfare we slipped quietly in to the routine life of the medical student.Dr.Saunders, City MOH and Professor of Public Health at the time,did offer a few gruff word of thanks to the volunteers as a group at the first lecture he gave us that Fall. Indeed far from getting us any special treatment academically there was the distinct impression that he had failed one of the volunteers in the Public Health exam the next Summer.  By that time deemed faulty knowledge of more pressing Public Health subjects such as Salmonella outbreaks caused by imported Chinese frozen egg  ,the dimensions of septic systems, and the Loch Maree disaster cancelled out any brownie points that might have been gained by volunteering for frontline duty in the polio epidemic.

While Patrick Cockburn was critical of the Cork medical establishment’s handling of the crisis the truth is the epidemic was well managed once it broke out; however an inexplicable oversight was the failure to organize the rapid introduction of mass vaccination once it was recognized that an outbreak was likely that Summer.  Such a course of action was adopted in an outbreak in Chicago that began some weeks before the first cases showed up in Cork .

Doctors and nurses went about their duties with dedication. Though we volunteers had no knowledge of medical administrative and management matters I can recall no instance of panic.  Names that come back to me are the unflappable Dr Kathleen O’Callaghan, Sister Stanislaus who ran the Unit with quiet efficiency and nurses like Nancy Riordan and Kathleen Stoker as well as many others we did’nt come in contact with and so unknown to me who went about the duties of going out in ambulances for affected and infective victims, and faithfully nursing them through their illness. Looking back through a veil of over 50 years I  recognize the heroism of these dedicated professionals so matter of factly taken for granted at the time.  For those I have’nt mentioned I must plead the incomplete memory bank of half a century.

Dr Stanley Leeson, a member of the Class of ’59 and  Cardiovascular Anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston , tells me that it was experiences gained in epidemics such as those in Cork and Copenhagen that gave rise to the introduction of controlled ventilation  during routine anaesthesia.

Ironically it appears that the conditions that facilitated the epidemic were due to improvements in hygienic conditions in the City and not the opposite as many residents believed at the time.  Many of the affected children came from new suburbs expressly built to eliminate old slum areas.   The newer cleaner environments paradoxically gave rise to a new generation raised without the immunity they might have acquired under the old living conditions.