This afternoon I ran across these lines in President David O. McKay’s closing remarks in October conference, 1952:
Our hearts go out to those in the Church who are grieving and worried because of sore affliction to their loved ones, and to those who have recently been bereft of loved ones, particularly through polio. As I look over those to whom we should express appreciation, I notice the absence of Brother Roy Darley, one of our organists. He and his wife are at the bedside of their only son, stricken with polio. Our prayers go out to them, and to President Clark and his daughter. President Clark’s little granddaughter, Luacine, has been suffering from that same affliction. We are thankful that she is recovering. We want the parents whose little child was stricken last evening, necessitating the father’s being called out from the priesthood meeting, to know that our prayers are that that dread disease may not be fatal to your loved one.
That goes to all parents whose hearts are filled with anxiety because of afflicted ones. This is a prayerful Church. We are one body, and when one suffers we all, to a degree, share that suffering.
Roy Darley’s son recovered. J. Reuben Clark’s granddaughter recovered (although she still suffers from the effects of that attack of polio all those decades ago). I do not know what child was stricken so suddenly that a father was called out of a conference session.
If we’ve forgotten how widespread and indiscriminate the plagues of the past were, or why parents greeted the development of each new vaccine with such gratitude and relief, maybe an illustration like this one deserves a moment’s reflection.
Wow. That’s rough! I’m grateful that ten years later we were lining up in grade school for our pink sugar cubes with polio vaccine. We also got shots in school.
We had a speaker in our ward once tell us that she got a bicycle for her 8th birthday, and she was so excited to ride it around the block. She never got to ride it again, because she was stricken with polio the next day. My dad talks about how terrified everyone was of it. Hooray for the polio vaccine!
Interestingly, my uncle had polio during this time–and recovered, but apparently it did not make my grandmother a vaccine believer. My mother remembers that her mother would not let her get all those shots, so my mom got measles and mumps and many of the rest of the typical childhood illnesses instead. But not polio, thankfully.
My father was more scared of polio than any other thing. When the vaccine came out in the sugar cube, he had us in line for it. When it came out in shot form, he had us in line again. It was overkill, but he’d had school friends who’d died from it. One of the three times in my life that I ever saw my father cry was when we got that sugar cube.
The elementary school a couple of my children attended was the site of the first administration of the polio vaccine. Parents all over the area were bringing their children in for the first trial, because the disease was so scary that it made an untested vaccination look like a good idea.
I personally managed to come down with measles, mumps, and rubella so as to already be sick when the vaccination arrived at my pediatrician’s office.
If your uncle got polio during the early 1950s, and your mother is about the same age, Lisa, then it’s likely that she wasn’t vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox because there were no vaccines in the late 50s-early 60s. I got all those illnesses–not because my parents were opposed to vaccines, but because there weren’t any.
Speaking of plagues of the past, I saw the Family Search page for the grandmother of the Washington DC area stake president who died last week. (He was a neighbor when I was a teen.) His grandmother gave birth to nine children, six of whom died at birth because of the Rh factor–presumably she was Rh negative and the babies were Rh positive. The Rh factor was first discovered in 1940, treatment by transfusion was developed by 1946, and a vaccine to treat the condition was approved in 1968. Another plague that thankfully has been put behind us.