It took the sudden passing of the 28-year-old England right-back in 1959 to get a generation pouring into clinics for inoculation against a disease that in the previous 10 years had killed over 3,000 people in England and Wales https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...n-story-jeff-hall-death-polio-birmingham-city I think there was an outbreak of the awful disease in Hull. Maybe members even older than me know something about it.
There was an outbreak in Hull. The Hull CC Medical Officer at the time was Alexander Hutchison and he pioneered the use of sugar cubes to administer the polio vaccine. I know this because my grandma used to be the Hutchison's cleaner, when my grandma retired they remained friends and Mrs Hutchison was my sister's godmother. http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/emer...-living-fear/story-17134322-detail/story.html
There was indeed we all had to have polio jabs at school. In fact later once I started work and one work colleagues daughter had caught it and was in leg irons.
A very long standing, generous, loyal and regularly-attending City fan was a polio sufferer during this era. A bigger City fan you could scarcely imagine. As an aside, it is telling that even a loyal soul like him is starting to doubt whether turning up for matches is worth the time and cost anymore. Dark times indeed.
Still giving jabs at the end of the 1950s round our way. The dad of a lad I grew up had polio before the war. He was a brilliant engineer and invented a device to help polio sufferers. As a thank you for all the care and attention he had received which had left him with a limp,but at the time was that was considered lucky, he gave the patents and royalties to polio research. My dad said these were worth over a quarter of a million pounds by the early 1970s, an awful lot of money in those days.
The Sabin oral vaccine only became commercially available from 1961 and was used in the Hull polio outbreak. From the mid 50's the injected Salk vaccine was commercially available and the one I had a couple of years later in Hull.
Ok, ta. I was born in 1945, and I distinctly remember having something on a sugar cube. Must have been summat else ... but what?
So you were 16 in 1961 living in Hull and attending high school. Over 350,000 people in October 1961 received the Sabin oral vaccine so logic says that was on the sugar cube. I was working in Lancaster.
Will always remember that lady. She checked hair,ears and teeth when I was 10 (1948). OK on the first 2 but she sent me to the local clinic to sort out my teeth. My almost non existent dental hygiene and regular diet of sweets, particularly McGowans toffee and chocolate toffee bars, plus love of lemonade/sarsaparilla and sugar sweetened tea necessitated major dental work. I went every Sat morning for weeks enduring the pain of having almost every cavity filled(wouldn't give me gas). When this finally finished they embarked on an exercise to bring my top teeth over my bottom teeth which involved fitting a horrible plastic moulding over my bottom teeth. Then I had to continually bite on it. When all the work was over I vowed never to go near a dentist again and I didn't until I came to Aus. 20 years later.
