<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At age ten, I received what I believed to be a veterinary-size dose of gamma globulin in each buttock and passed out cold in the doctor\u2019s waiting room. A polio epidemic had taken down a boy in an adjacent block of our neighborhood. Some lady hollered at us to get out of the river we played in or we would get sick and die and my parents were taking no chances. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A couple years later as a newspaper carrier I plopped on people\u2019s\nporches an edition headlining Dr. Jonas Salk\u2019s discovery of an injectable polio\nvaccine. More shots. Smaller. This time everyone I knew got them, waiting in\nlinoleum-floored rooms with old magazines all over town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I saw only two cases of polio in my practice, one in an\nunvaccinated adult, the other in a recently vaccinated child. Diagnosed the\nfirst, missed the second. Never saw a case in training, had to look it up. I\nchecked out a possible third case with an elderly pediatrician. He had finished\nhis hospital rounds and was putting on his coat to go home. He assured me that\nfrom the history it wasn\u2019t polio. What the child had, he couldn\u2019t say, but\n\u201cIt\u2019s not polio.\u201d He had seen hundreds of cases of real polio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a relief to hear. You can only get so much from books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Medical Humanities <\/em>35, 2, 2009 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At age ten, I received what I believed to be a veterinary-size dose of gamma globulin in each buttock and passed out cold in the doctor\u2019s waiting room. A polio epidemic had taken down a boy in an adjacent block of our neighborhood. Some lady hollered at us to get out of the river we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poems"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pahwNU-8J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":847,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions\/847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jamesbrueggemann.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}