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A personal memoir of the last great polio epidemic, affecting 50,000 people, and of the author?s own experience of polio; a portrait of his parents, both radicals; and the story of the epidemic in Cork, Ireland, where the author and his family lived in t
Vintage
August 2006
On Sale: July 22, 2006
320 pages
ISBN: 009945923X
EAN: 9780099459231
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Non-Fiction Memoir
It is very easy to get polio. Patrick Cockburn was six when
he woke up one day in the summer of 1956 with a headache and
a sore throat. His parents, Claud and Patricia Cockburn, had
recently returned to Ireland, to their house in East Cork,
careless of the fact that a polio epidemic had broken out in
Cork City. He caught the disease and was taken to the fever
hospital where, alone for the first time in his life, he was
kept in isolation. The virus attacks the nerves of the brain
and the spinal cord leading to paralysis of the muscles. Patrick could no longer walk. The Broken Boy is at once a
memoir of Patrick Cockburn's own experience of polio, a
portrait of his parents, both prominent radicals, and the
story of the Cork epidemic, the last great polio epidemic in
the world, affecting 50,000 people. This terrible disease
always behaved strangely, attacking the middle classes
rather than the poor, children rather than adults, and
striking fear everywhere. In Cork the authorities tried to
suppress mention of the epidemic in the press; in the rest
of Ireland people from Cork were treated as pariahs. Believing Patrick was dying because of poor conditions in
the hospital Claud Cockburn took him home. At first he could
only crawl or move in a wheelchair, but gradually he learned
to walk again. In 1957, the vaccine that conquered polio
reached Ireland.
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